II.Metropolis
There were Babylon and Nineveh: they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn ... Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
There were Babylon and Nineveh: they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn ... Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
Whenthe door of the room closed behind him, Ed Thatcher felt very lonely, full of prickly restlessness. If Susie were only here he’d tell her about the big money he was going to make and how he’d deposit ten dollars a week in the savings bank just for little Ellen; that would make five hundred and twenty dollars a year.... Why in ten years without the interest that’d come to more than five thousand dollars. I must compute the compound interest on five hundred and twenty dollars at four per cent. He walked excitedly about the narrow room. The gas jet purred comfortably like a cat. His eyes fell on the headline on aJournalthat lay on the floor by the coalscuttle where he had dropped it to run for the hack to take Susie to the hospital.
MORTON SIGNS THE GREATER NEW YORK BILLCompletes the Act Making New York World’s SecondMetropolis
Breathing deep he folded the paper and laid it on the table. The world’s second metropolis.... And dad wanted me to stay in his ole fool store in Onteora. Might have if it hadnt been for Susie.... Gentlemen tonight that you do me the signal honor of offering me the junior partnership in yourfirm I want to present to you my little girl, my wife. I owe everything to her.
In the bow he made towards the grate his coat-tails flicked a piece of china off the console beside the bookcase. He made a little clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth as he stooped to pick it up. The head of the blue porcelain Dutch girl had broken off from her body. “And poor Susie’s so fond of her knicknacks. I’d better go to bed.”
He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.
The street was suddenly full of running. Somebody out of breath let out the word Fire.
“Where at?”
The group of boys melted off the stoop across the way. Thatcher turned back into the room. It was stifling hot. He was all tingling to be out. I ought to go to bed. Down the street he heard the splattering hoofbeats and the frenzied bell of a fire engine. Just take a look. He ran down the stairs with his hat in his hand.
“Which way is it?”
“Down on the next block.”
“It’s a tenement house.”
It was a narrowwindowed sixstory tenement. The hookandladder had just drawn up. Brown smoke, with here and there a little trail of sparks was pouring fast out of the lower windows. Three policemen were swinging their clubs as they packed the crowd back against the steps and railings of the houses opposite. In the empty space in the middle of the street the fire engine and the red hosewagon shone withbright brass. People watched silent staring at the upper windows where shadows moved and occasional light flickered. A thin pillar of flame began to flare above the house like a romancandle.
“The airshaft,” whispered a man in Thatcher’s ear. A gust of wind filled the street with smoke and a smell of burning rags. Thatcher felt suddenly sick. When the smoke cleared he saw people hanging in a kicking cluster, hanging by their hands from a windowledge. The other side firemen were helping women down a ladder. The flame in the center of the house flared brighter. Something black had dropped from a window and lay on the pavement shrieking. The policemen were shoving the crowd back to the ends of the block. New fire engines were arriving.
“Theyve got five alarms in,” a man said. “What do you think of that? Everyone of ’em on the two top floors was trapped. It’s an incendiary done it. Some goddam firebug.”
A young man sat huddled on the curb beside the gas lamp. Thatcher found himself standing over him pushed by the crowd from behind.
“He’s an Italian.”
“His wife’s in that buildin.”
“Cops wont let him get by.” “His wife’s in a family way. He cant talk English to ask the cops.”
The man wore blue suspenders tied up with a piece of string in back. His back was heaving and now and then he left out a string of groaning words nobody understood.
Thatcher was working his way out of the crowd. At the corner a man was looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past him he caught a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man looked up into his face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks and bright popeyes. Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold. The firebug. The papers say they hang round like that to watch it. He walked home fast, ran up the stairs, and locked the room door behind him. The room was quiet and empty. He’d forgotten that Susie wouldnt be there waiting for him. Hebegan to undress. He couldnt forget the smell of coaloil on the man’s clothes.
Mr. Perry flicked at the burdock leaves with his cane. The real-estate agent was pleading in a singsong voice:
“I dont mind telling you, Mr. Perry, it’s an opportunity not to be missed. You know the old saying sir ... opportunity knocks but once on a young man’s door. In six months I can virtually guarantee that these lots will have doubled in value. Now that we are a part of New York, the second city in the world, sir, dont forget that.... Why the time will come, and I firmly believe that you and I will see it, when bridge after bridge spanning the East River have made Long Island and Manhattan one, when the Borough of Queens will be as much the heart and throbbing center of the great metropolis as is Astor Place today.”
“I know, I know, but I’m looking for something dead safe. And besides I want to build. My wife hasnt been very well these last few years....”
“But what could be safer than my proposition? Do you realize Mr. Perry, that at considerable personal loss I’m letting you in on the ground floor of one of the greatest real-estate certainties of modern times. I’m putting at your disposal not only security, but ease, comfort, luxury. We are caught up Mr. Perry on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical inventions—telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles—they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in the forefront of progress.... My God! I cant begin to tell you what it will mean....” Poking amid the dry grass and the burdock leaves Mr. Perry had moved something with his stick. He stooped and picked up a triangular skull with a pair of spiralfluted horns. “By gad!” he said. “That must have been a fine ram.”
Drowsy from the smell of lather and bayrum and singed hair that weighed down the close air of the barbershop, Bud sat nodding, his hands dangling big and red between his knees. In his eardrums he could still feel through the snipping of scissors the pounding of his feet on the hungry road down from Nyack.
“Next!”
“Whassat?... All right I just want a shave an a haircut.”
The barber’s pudgy hands moved through his hair, the scissors whirred like a hornet behind his ears. His eyes kept closing; he jerked them open fighting sleep. He could see beyond the striped sheet littered with sandy hair the bobbing hammerhead of the colored boy shining his shoes.
“Yessir” a deepvoiced man droned from the next chair, “it’s time the Democratic party nominated a strong ...”
“Want a neckshave as well?” The barber’s greasyskinned moonface poked into his.
He nodded.
“Shampoo?”
“No.”
When the barber threw back the chair to shave him he wanted to crane his neck like a mudturtle turned over on its back. The lather spread drowsily on his face, prickling his nose, filling up his ears. Drowning in featherbeds of lather, blue lather, black, slit by the faraway glint of the razor, glint of the grubbing hoe through blueblack lather clouds. The old man on his back in the potatofield, his beard sticking up lathery white full of blood. Full of blood his socks from those blisters on his heels. His hands gripped each other cold and horny like a dead man’s hands under the sheet. Lemme git up.... He opened his eyes. Padded fingertips were stroking his chin. He stared up at the ceiling where four flies made figure eights round a red crêpe-paper bell. His tongue was dry leather in his mouth. The barber righted the chair again. Bud looked about blinking. “Four bits, and a nickel for the shine.”
ADMITS KILLING CRIPPLED MOTHER ...
“D’yous mind if I set here a minute an read that paper?” he hears his voice drawling in his pounding ears.
“Go right ahead.”
PARKER’S FRIENDS PROTECT ...
The black print squirms before his eyes. Russians ... MOB STONES ... (Special Dispatch to theHerald) Trenton, N. J.
Nathan Sibbetts, fourteen years old, broke down today after two weeks of steady denial of guilt and confessed to the police that he was responsible for the death of his aged and crippled mother, Hannah Sibbetts, after a quarrel in their home at Jacob’s Creek, six miles above this city. Tonight he was committed to await the action of the Grand Jury.
Nathan Sibbetts, fourteen years old, broke down today after two weeks of steady denial of guilt and confessed to the police that he was responsible for the death of his aged and crippled mother, Hannah Sibbetts, after a quarrel in their home at Jacob’s Creek, six miles above this city. Tonight he was committed to await the action of the Grand Jury.
RELIEVE PORT ARTHUR IN FACE OF ENEMY ... Mrs. Rix Loses Husband’s Ashes.
On Tuesday May 24 at about half past eight o’clock I came home after sleeping on the steam roller all night, he said, and went upstairs to sleep some more. I had only gotten to sleep when my mother came upstairs and told me to get up and if I didn’t get up she would throw me downstairs. My mother grabbed hold of me to throw me downstairs. I threw her first and she fell to the bottom. I went downstairs and found that her head was twisted to one side. I then saw that she was dead and then I straightened her neck and covered her up with the cover from my bed.
On Tuesday May 24 at about half past eight o’clock I came home after sleeping on the steam roller all night, he said, and went upstairs to sleep some more. I had only gotten to sleep when my mother came upstairs and told me to get up and if I didn’t get up she would throw me downstairs. My mother grabbed hold of me to throw me downstairs. I threw her first and she fell to the bottom. I went downstairs and found that her head was twisted to one side. I then saw that she was dead and then I straightened her neck and covered her up with the cover from my bed.
Bud folds the paper carefully, lays it on the chair and leaves the barbershop. Outside the air smells of crowds, is full of noise and sunlight. No more’n a needle in a haystack ... “An I’m twentyfive years old,” he muttered aloud. Think of a kid fourteen.... He walks faster along roaring pavements where the sun shines through the Elevated striping the blue street with warm seething yellow stripes. No more’n a needle in a haystack.
Ed Thatcher sat hunched over the pianokeys picking out the Mosquito Parade. Sunday afternoon sunlight streamed dustily through the heavy lace curtains of the window, squirmed in the red roses of the carpet, filled the clutteredparlor with specks and splinters of light. Susie Thatcher sat limp by the window watching him out of eyes too blue for her sallow face. Between them, stepping carefully among the roses on the sunny field of the carpet, little Ellen danced. Two small hands held up the pinkfrilled dress and now and then an emphatic little voice said, “Mummy watch my expression.”
“Just look at the child,” said Thatcher, still playing. “She’s a regular little balletdancer.”
Sheets of the Sunday paper lay where they had fallen from the table; Ellen started dancing on them, tearing the sheets under her nimble tiny feet.
“Dont do that Ellen dear,” whined Susie from the pink plush chair.
“But mummy I can do it while I dance.”
“Dont do that mother said.” Ed Thatcher had slid into the Barcarole. Ellen was dancing to it, her arms swaying to it, her feet nimbly tearing the paper.
“Ed for Heaven’s sake pick the child up; she’s tearing the paper.”
He brought his fingers down in a lingering chord. “Deary you mustnt do that. Daddy’s not finished reading it.”
Ellen went right on. Thatcher swooped down on her from the pianostool and set her squirming and laughing on his knee. “Ellen you should always mind when mummy speaks to you, and dear you shouldnt be destructive. It costs money to make that paper and people worked on it and daddy went out to buy it and he hasnt finished reading it yet. Ellie understands dont she now? We need con-struction and not de-struction in this world.” Then he went on with the Barcarole and Ellen went on dancing, stepping carefully among the roses on the sunny field of the carpet.
There were six men at the table in the lunch room eating fast with their hats on the backs of their heads.
“Jiminy crickets!” cried the young man at the end of thetable who was holding a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “Kin you beat it?”
“Beat what?” growled a longfaced man with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.
“Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue.... Ladies screamed and ran in all directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake crawled out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to cross the sidewalk....”
“Some fish story....”
“That aint nothin,” said an old man. “When I was a boy we used to go snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats....”
“Holy Moses! it’s quarter of nine,” muttered the young man folding his paper and hurrying out into Hudson Street that was full of men and girls walking briskly through the ruddy morning. The scrape of the shoes of hairyhoofed drayhorses and the grind of the wheels of producewagons made a deafening clatter and filled the air with sharp dust. A girl in a flowered bonnet with a big lavender bow under her pert tilted chin was waiting for him in the door of M. Sullivan & Co., Storage and Warehousing. The young man felt all fizzy inside, like a freshly uncorked bottle of pop.
“Hello Emily!... Say Emily I’ve got a raise.”
“You’re pretty near late, d’you know that?”
“But honest injun I’ve got a two-dollar raise.”
She tilted her chin first to oneside and then to the other.
“I dont give a rap.”
“You know what you said if I got a raise.” She looked in his eyes giggling.
“An this is just the beginnin ...”
“But what good’s fifteen dollars a week?”
“Why it’s sixty dollars a month, an I’m learning the import business.”
“Silly boy you’ll be late.” She suddenly turned and ran up the littered stairs, her pleated bellshaped skirt swishing from side to side.
“God! I hate her. I hate her.” Sniffing up the tearsthat were hot in his eyes, he walked fast down Hudson Street to the office of Winkle & Gulick, West India Importers.
The deck beside the forward winch was warm and briny damp. They were sprawled side by side in greasy denims talking drowsily in whispers, their ears full of the seethe of broken water as the bow shoved bluntly through the long grassgray swells of the Gulf Stream.
“J’te dis mon vieux, moi j’fou l’camp à New York.... The minute we tie up I go ashore and I stay ashore. I’m through with this dog’s life.” The cabinboy had fair hair and an oval pink-and-cream face; a dead cigarette butt fell from between his lips as he spoke. “Merde!” He reached for it as it rolled down the deck. It escaped his hand and bounced into the scuppers.
“Let it go. I’ve got plenty,” said the other boy who lay on his belly kicking a pair of dirty feet up into the hazy sunlight. “The consul will just have you shipped back.”
“He wont catch me.”
“And your military service?”
“To hell with it. And with France too for that matter.”
“You want to make yourself an American citizen?”
“Why not? A man has a right to choose his country.”
The other rubbed his nose meditatively with his fist and then let his breath out in a long whistle. “Emile you’re a wise guy,” he said.
“But Congo, why dont you come too? You dont want to shovel crap in a stinking ship’s galley all your life.”
Congo rolled himself round and sat up crosslegged, scratching his head that was thick with kinky black hair.
“Say how much does a woman cost in New York?”
“I dunno, expensive I guess.... I’m not going ashore to raise hell; I’m going to get a good job and work. Cant you think of nothing but women?”
“What’s the use? Why not?” said Congo and settled himselfflat on the deck again, burying his dark sootsmudged face in his crossed arms.
“I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean. Europe’s rotten and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth dont matter, education dont matter. It’s all getting ahead.”
“And if there was a nice passionate little woman right here now where the deck’s warm, you wouldn’t like to love her up?”
“After we’re rich, we’ll have plenty, plenty of everything.”
“And they dont have any military service?”
“Why should they? Its the coin they’re after. They dont want to fight people; they want to do business with them.”
Congo did not answer.
The cabin boy lay on his back looking at the clouds. They floated from the west, great piled edifices with the sunlight crashing through between, bright and white like tinfoil. He was walking through tall white highpiled streets, stalking in a frock coat with a tall white collar up tinfoil stairs, broad, cleanswept, through blue portals into streaky marble halls where money rustled and clinked on long tinfoil tables, banknotes, silver, gold.
“Merde v’là l’heure.” The paired strokes of the bell in the crowsnest came faintly to their ears. “But dont forget, Congo, the first night we get ashore ...” He made a popping noise with his lips. “We’re gone.”
“I was asleep. I dreamed of a little blonde girl. I’d have had her if you hadnt waked me.” The cabinboy got to his feet with a grunt and stood a moment looking west to where the swells ended in a sharp wavy line against a sky hard and abrupt as nickel. Then he pushed Congo’s face down against the deck and ran aft, the wooden clogs clattering on his bare feet as he went.
Outside, the hot June Saturday was dragging its frazzledends down 110th Street. Susie Thatcher lay uneasily in bed, her hands spread blue and bony on the coverlet before her. Voices came through the thin partition. A young girl was crying through her nose:
“I tell yer mommer I aint agoin back to him.”
Then came expostulating an old staid Jewish woman’s voice: “But Rosie, married life aint all beer and skittles. A vife must submit and vork for her husband.”
“I wont. I cant help it. I wont go back to the dirty brute.”
Susie sat up in bed, but she couldn’t hear the next thing the old woman said.
“But I aint a Jew no more,” suddenly screeched the young girl. “This aint Russia; it’s little old New York. A girl’s got some rights here.” Then a door slammed and everything was quiet.
Susie Thatcher stirred in bed moaning fretfully. Those awful people never give me a moment’s peace. From below came the jingle of a pianola playing the Merry Widow Waltz. O Lord! why dont Ed come home? It’s cruel of them to leave a sick woman alone like this. Selfish. She twisted up her mouth and began to cry. Then she lay quiet again, staring at the ceiling watching the flies buzz teasingly round the electriclight fixture. A wagon clattered by down the street. She could hear children’s voices screeching. A boy passed yelling an extra. Suppose there’d been a fire. That terrible Chicago theater fire. Oh I’ll go mad! She tossed about in the bed, her pointed nails digging into the palms of her hands. I’ll take another tablet. Maybe I can get some sleep. She raised herself on her elbow and took the last tablet out of a little tin box. The gulp of water that washed the tablet down was soothing to her throat. She closed her eyes and lay quiet.
She woke with a start. Ellen was jumping round the room, her green tam falling off the back of her head, her coppery curls wild.
“Oh mummy I want to be a little boy.”
“Quieter dear. Mother’s not feeling a bit well.”
“I want to be a little boy.”
“Why Ed what have you done to the child? She’s all wrought up.”
“We’re just excited, Susie. We’ve been to the most wonderful play. You’d have loved it, it’s so poetic and all that sort of thing. And Maude Adams was fine. Ellie loved every minute of it.”
“It seems silly, as I said before, to take such a young child ...”
“Oh daddy I want to be a boy.”
“I like my little girl the way she is. We’ll have to go again Susie and take you.”
“Ed you know very well I wont be well enough.” She sat bolt upright, her hair hanging a straight faded yellow down her back. “Oh, I wish I’d die ... I wish I’d die, and not be a burden to you any more.... You hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me alone like this.” She choked and put her face in her hands. “Oh I wish I’d die,” she sobbed through her fingers.
“Now Susie for Heaven’s sakes, it’s wicked to talk like that.” He put his arm round her and sat on the bed beside her.
Crying quietly she dropped her head on his shoulder. Ellen stood staring at them out of round gray eyes. Then she started jumping up and down, chanting to herself, “Ellie’s goin to be a boy, Ellie’s goin to be a boy.”
With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plankroads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. Passing under a scaffolding in front of a new building, he caught the eye of an old man who sat on the edge of the sidewalk trimming oil lamps. Bud stood beside him, hitching up his pants; cleared his throat:
“Say mister you couldnt tell a feller where a good place was to look for a job?”
“Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller.... There’s jobs all right.... I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.”
“Anything that’s a job’ll do me.”
“Got a union card?”
“I aint got nothin.”
“Cant git no job in the buildin trades without a union card,” said the old man. He rubbed the gray bristles of his chin with the back of his hand and leaned over the lamps again. Bud stood staring into the dustreeking girder forest of the new building until he found the eyes of a man in a derby hat fixed on him through the window of the watchman’s shelter. He shuffled his feet uneasily and walked on. If I could git more into the center of things....
At the next corner a crowd was collecting round a highslung white automobile. Clouds of steam poured out of its rear end. A policeman was holding up a small boy by the armpits. From the car a redfaced man with white walrus whiskers was talking angrily.
“I tell you officer he threw a stone.... This sort of thing has got to stop. For an officer to countenance hoodlums and rowdies....”
A woman with her hair done up in a tight bunch on top of her head was screaming, shaking her fist at the man in the car, “Officer he near run me down he did, he near run me down.”
Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.
“Wassa matter?”
“Hell I dunno.... One o them automoebile riots I guess. Aint you read the paper? I dont blame em do you? What right have those golblamed automoebiles got racin round the city knockin down wimen an children?”
“Gosh do they do that?”
“Sure they do.”
“Say ... er ... kin you tell me about where’s a good place to find out about gettin a job?” The butcherboy threw back head and laughed.
“Kerist I thought you was goin to ask for a handout.... I guess you aint a Newyorker.... I’ll tell you what to do. You keep right on down Broadway till you get to City Hall....”
“Is that kinder the center of things?”
“Sure it is.... An then you go upstairs and ask the Mayor.... Tell me there are some seats on the board of aldermen ...”
“Like hell they are,” growled Bud and walked away fast.
“Roll ye babies ... roll ye lobsided sons o bitches.”
“That’s it talk to em Slats.”
“Come seven!” Slats shot the bones out of his hand, brought the thumb along his sweaty fingers with a snap. “Aw hell.”
“You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.”
Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the circle of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on their heels under a lamp on South Street.
“Come on girlies we’re waitin for it.... Roll ye little bastards, goddam ye, roll.”
“Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down the block.”
“I’d knock his block off for a ...”
Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless face shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins. Then he ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway between two houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and waited. The confused voices of the gang broke into the passageway; then they had gone on down the street. The boy was counting the nickels in his hand. Ten. “Jez, that’s fifty cents.... I’ll tell ’em Big Leonard scooped up the dough.” His pockets had no bottoms, so he tied the nickels into one of his shirt tails.
A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at each place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on the lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a sparse chopping of onion and white of egg. “Beaucoup de soing and dont you forget it,” said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly forehead. He was a short waddling man with a few black strands of hair plastered tight across a domed skull.
“Awright.” Emile nodded his head gravely. His collar was too tight for him. He was shaking a last bottle of champagne into the nickelbound bucket of ice on the serving-table.
“Beaucoup de soing, sporca madonna.... Thisa guy trows money about lika confetti, see.... Gives tips, see. He’s a verra rich gentleman. He dont care how much he spend.” Emile patted the crease of the tablecloth to flatten it. “Fais pas, como, ça.... Your hand’s dirty, maybe leava mark.”
Resting first on one foot then on the other they stood waiting, their napkins under their arms. From the restaurant below among the buttery smells of food and the tinkleof knives and forks and plates, came the softly gyrating sound of a waltz.
When he saw the headwaiter bow outside the door Emile compressed his lips into a deferential smile. There was a longtoothed blond woman in a salmon operacloak swishing on the arm of a moonfaced man who carried his top hat ahead of him like a bumper; there was a little curlyhaired girl in blue who was showing her teeth and laughing, a stout woman in a tiara with a black velvet ribbon round her neck, a bottlenose, a long cigarcolored face ... shirtfronts, hands straightening white ties, black gleams on top hats and patent leather shoes; there was a weazlish man with gold teeth who kept waving his arms spitting out greetings in a voice like a crow’s and wore a diamond the size of a nickel in his shirtfront. The redhaired cloakroom girl was collecting the wraps. The old waiter nudged Emile. “He’s de big boss,” he said out of the corner of his mouth as he bowed. Emile flattened himself against the wall as they shuffled rustled into the room. A whiff of patchouli when he drew his breath made him go suddenly hot to the roots of his hair.
“But where’s Fifi Waters?” shouted the man with the diamond stud.
“She said she couldnt get here for a half an hour. I guess the Johnnies wont let her get by the stage door.”
“Well we cant wait for her even if it is her birthday; never waited for anyone in my life.” He stood a second running a roving eye over the women round the table, then shot his cuffs out a little further from the sleeves of his swallowtail coat, and abruptly sat down. The caviar vanished in a twinkling. “And waiter what about that Rhine wine coupe?” he croaked huskily. “De suite monsieur....” Emile holding his breath and sucking in his cheeks, was taking away the plates. A frost came on the goblets as the old waiter poured out the coupe from a cut glass pitcher where floated mint and ice and lemon rind and long slivvers of cucumber.
“Aha, this’ll do the trick.” The man with the diamond stud raised his glass to his lips, smacked them and set it downwith a slanting look at the woman next him. She was putting dabs of butter on bits of bread and popping them into her mouth, muttering all the while:
“I can only eat the merest snack, only the merest snack.”
“That dont keep you from drinkin Mary does it?”
She let out a cackling laugh and tapped him on the shoulder with her closed fan. “O Lord, you’re a card, you are.”
“Allume moi ça, sporca madonna,” hissed the old waiter in Emile’s ear.
When he lit the lamps under the two chafing dishes on the serving table a smell of hot sherry and cream and lobster began to seep into the room. The air was hot, full of tinkle and perfume and smoke. After he had helped serve the lobster Newburg and refilled the glasses Emile leaned against the wall and ran his hand over his wet hair. His eyes slid along the plump shoulders of the woman in front of him and down the powdered back to where a tiny silver hook had come undone under the lace rushing. The baldheaded man next to her had his leg locked with hers. She was young, Emile’s age, and kept looking up into the man’s face with moist parted lips. It made Emile dizzy, but he couldn’t stop looking.
“But what’s happened to the fair Fifi?” creaked the man with the diamond stud through a mouthful of lobster. “I suppose that she made such a hit again this evening that our simple little party dont appeal to her.”
“It’s enough to turn any girl’s head.”
“Well she’ll get the surprise of her young life if she expected us to wait. Haw, haw, haw,” laughed the man with the diamond stud. “I never waited for anybody in my life and I’m not going to begin now.”
Down the table the moonfaced man had pushed back his plate and was playing with the bracelet on the wrist of the woman beside him. “You’re the perfect Gibson girl tonight, Olga.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait now,” she said holding up her goblet against the light.
“To Gibson?”
“No to a real painter.”
“By Gad I’ll buy it.”
“Maybe you wont have a chance.”
She nodded her blond pompadour at him.
“You’re a wicked little tease, Olga.”
She laughed keeping her lips tight over her long teeth.
A man was leaning towards the man with the diamond stud, tapping with a stubby finger on the table.
“No sir as a real estate proposition, Twentythird Street has crashed.... That’s generally admitted.... But what I want to talk to you about privately sometime Mr. Godalming, is this.... How’s all the big money in New York been made? Astor, Vanderbilt, Fish.... In real estate of course. Now it’s up to us to get in on the next great clean-up.... It’s almost here.... Buy Forty....”
The man with the diamond stud raised one eyebrow and shook his head. “For one night on Beauty’s lap, O put gross care away ... or something of the sort.... Waiter why in holy hell are you so long with the champagne?” He got to his feet, coughed in his hand and began to sing in his croaking voice:
O would the Atlantic were all champagneBright billows of champagne.
O would the Atlantic were all champagneBright billows of champagne.
O would the Atlantic were all champagne
Bright billows of champagne.
Everybody clapped. The old waiter had just divided a baked Alaska and, his face like a beet, was prying out a stiff champagnecork. When the cork popped the lady in the tiara let out a yell. They toasted the man in the diamond stud.
For he’s a jolly good fellow ...
For he’s a jolly good fellow ...
For he’s a jolly good fellow ...
“Now what kind of a dish d’ye call this?” the man with the bottlenose leaned over and asked the girl next to him. Her black hair parted in the middle; she wore a palegreen dress with puffy sleeves. He winked slowly and then stared hard into her black eyes.
“This here’s the fanciest cookin I ever put in my mouth.... D’ye know young leddy, I dont come to this town often....” He gulped down the rest of his glass. “An when I do I usually go away kinder disgusted....” His look bright and feverish from the champagne explored the contours of her neck and shoulders and roamed down a bare arm. “But this time I kinder think....”
“It must be a great life prospecting,” she interrupted flushing.
“It was a great life in the old days, a rough life but a man’s life.... I’m glad I made my pile in the old days.... Wouldnt have the same luck now.”
She looked up at him. “How modest you are to call it luck.”
Emile was standing outside the door of the private room. There was nothing more to serve. The redhaired girl from the cloakroom walked by with a big flounced cape on her arm. He smiled, tried to catch her eye. She sniffed and tossed her nose in the air. Wont look at me because I’m a waiter. When I make some money I’ll show ’em.
“Dis; tella Charlie two more bottle Moet and Chandon, Gout Americain,” came the old waiter’s hissing voice in his ear.
The moonfaced man was on his feet. “Ladies and Gentlemen....”
“Silence in the pigsty ...” piped up a voice.
“The big sow wants to talk,” said Olga under her breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen owing to the unfortunate absence of our star of Bethlehem and fulltime act....”
“Gilly dont blaspheme,” said the lady with the tiara.
“Ladies and gentlemen, unaccustomed as I am....”
“Gilly you’re drunk.”
“... Whether the tide ... I mean whether the waters be with us or against us...”
Somebody yanked at his coat-tails and the moonfaced man sat down suddenly in his chair.
“It’s terrible,” said the lady in the tiara addressing herself to a man with a long face the color of tobacco who sat at theend of the table ... “It’s terrible, Colonel, the way Gilly gets blasphemous when he’s been drinking...”
The Colonel was meticulously rolling the tinfoil off a cigar. “Dear me, you dont say?” he drawled. Above the bristly gray mustache his face was expressionless. “There’s a most dreadful story about poor old Atkins, Elliott Atkins who used to be with Mansfield...”
“Indeed?” said the Colonel icily as he slit the end of the cigar with a small pearlhandled penknife.
“Say Chester did you hear that Mabie Evans was making a hit?”
“Honestly Olga I dont see how she does it. She has no figure...”
“Well he made a speech, drunk as a lord you understand, one night when they were barnstorming in Kansas...”
“She cant sing...”
“The poor fellow never did go very strong in the bright lights...”
“She hasnt the slightest particle of figure...”
“And made a sort of Bob Ingersoll speech...”
“The dear old feller.... Ah I knew him well out in Chicago in the old days...”
“You dont say.” The Colonel held a lighted match carefully to the end of his cigar...
“And there was a terrible flash of lightning and a ball of fire came in one window and went out the other.”
“Was he ... er ... killed?” The Colonel sent a blue puff of smoke towards the ceiling.
“What, did you say Bob Ingersoll had been struck by lightning?” cried Olga shrilly. “Serve him right the horrid atheist.”
“No not exactly, but it scared him into a realization of the important things of life and now he’s joined the Methodist church.”
“Funny how many actors get to be ministers.”
“Cant get an audience any other way,” creaked the man with the diamond stud.
The two waiters hovered outside the door listening tothe racket inside. “Tas de sacrés cochons ... sporca madonna!” hissed the old waiter. Emile shrugged his shoulders. “That brunette girl make eyes at you all night...” He brought his face near Emile’s and winked. “Sure, maybe you pick up somethin good.”
“I dont want any of them or their dirty diseases either.”
The old waiter slapped his thigh. “No young men nowadays.... When I was young man I take heap o chances.”
“They dont even look at you ...” said Emile through clenched teeth. “An animated dress suit that’s all.”
“Wait a minute, you learn by and by.”
The door opened. They bowed respectfully towards the diamond stud. Somebody had drawn a pair of woman’s legs on his shirtfront. There was a bright flush on each of his cheeks. The lower lid of one eye sagged, giving his weasle face a quizzical lobsided look.
“Wazzahell, Marco wazzahell?” he was muttering. “We aint got a thing to drink.... Bring the Atlantic Ozz-shen and two quarts.”
“De suite monsieur....” The old waiter bowed. “Emile tell Auguste, immediatement et bien frappé.”
As Emile went down the corridor he could hear singing.
O would the Atlantic were all champagneBright bi-i-i....
O would the Atlantic were all champagneBright bi-i-i....
O would the Atlantic were all champagne
Bright bi-i-i....
The moonface and the bottlenose were coming back from the lavatory reeling arm in arm among the palms in the hall.
“These damn fools make me sick.”
“Yessir these aint the champagne suppers we used to have in Frisco in the ole days.”
“Ah those were great days those.”
“By the way,” the moonfaced man steadied himself against the wall, “Holyoke ole fella, did you shee that very nobby little article on the rubber trade I got into the morning papers.... That’ll make the investors nibble ... like lil mishe.”
“Whash you know about rubber?... The stuff aint no good.”
“You wait an shee, Holyoke ole fella or you looshing opportunity of your life.... Drunk or sober I can smell money ... on the wind.”
“Why aint you got any then?” The bottlenosed man’s beefred face went purple; he doubled up letting out great hoots of laughter.
“Because I always let my friends in on my tips,” said the other man soberly. “Hay boy where’s zis here private dinin room?”
“Par ici monsieur.”
A red accordionpleated dress swirled past them, a little oval face framed by brown flat curls, pearly teeth in an open-mouthed laugh.
“Fifi Waters,” everyone shouted. “Why my darlin lil Fifi, come to my arms.”
She was lifted onto a chair where she stood jiggling from one foot to the other, champagne dripping out of a tipped glass.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Happy New Year.”
“Many returns of the day....”
A fair young man who had followed her in was reeling intricately round the table singing: