PART ONE
NINTH AVENUECHAPTER I
NINTH AVENUE
Whenthe light of morning touches the buildings and pavements of a city, it always seems to borrow their hardness and to lose in some degree its quality of flowing detachment. The Sunday morning that fell upon Ninth Avenue, New York City, gave you a sense of invisible stiffness in its very air. The buildings, with their smudged, flat fronts and tops, presented the impression of huge warehouses stretching down both sides of the street—the appearance of holding commodities rather than human beings. Most of them were five or six stories in height, and their curtained, oblong windows and the bright, tawdry shops at their base had an oddly lifeless aspect, in spite of the sounds and animations which occurred within and around them. The iron elevated-railroad structure that extended down the street, with all of its roar and rush of trains, could not destroy the spirit of silent inertia that lurked within the scene.
Blanche Palmer stood in front of a bureau, in one of the apartments that lined the street, and combed her dark red, bobbed hair, as though it were a sacred and perilous performance. She was only partially dressed, and the mild light that came in through arear window from the courtyard brought an extra vividness to her semiplump arms, abruptly rounded shoulders and moderately swelling bosom. Their freshness stood out, a little forlorn and challenging, in the disordered room with its half drab and half gaudy arrangements. The brass bed, the magazine-posters of pretty women against the pink-flowered wallpaper, the red plush chair with the most infinitely smug of shapes, the white chintz, half-dirty curtain and dark green shade at the window—all of them seemed to be meanly contending against the youth and life of her body.
She was fairly tall, with most of the weight of her body centered below her waist and with an incongruously small torso, but this effect was not as clumsy as it might have been, since it was relieved by a bold approach to symmetry. Something of a child and an amazon met in her body. Her face was not pretty if you examined each of its features separately—the overwide lips, the nose tilting out too suddenly at the tip, and the overstraight, shaved eyebrows—but the whole of it had a piquant and enticing irregularity, and it was redeemed by her large, deeply set, bluish-gray eyes and the fine smoothness of her cream-white skin.
Her twenty years of life had given her a self-consciousness, and a hasty worldly wisdom, and a slightly complacent sexual alertness, and these three qualities blended into the customary expressions on her face. Yet at odd moments it showed questioning and dissatisfied shades. She was just a little more frank and wondering than the other girls in her environment—justa little distressed and seeking beneath all of the affected wrigglings, and ignorances, and small, cruel impulses that ruled her heart and mind. As she stood before the bureau, the treble of a child’s voice emerged from the babble of sounds in the surrounding apartments, lifting the words: “Well, it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore, it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore; how in the heck can I wash my neck when it ain’t gonna rain no mo-ore.” Blanche took up the song, half humming it as she slipped on an old, black, sleeveless evening gown which she still kept to wear about the apartment when visitors were not present or expected. It had a big, scarlet satine flower sewed at the side of the waist and was extremely low-necked and gave her a near-courtesan touch, increased by the over-thick rouge and lipstick on her face. She could not dispense with cosmetics, even before her family, because they were too inherently a part of the shaky sexual pride within her, which always needed to be glossed and protected because it had been frequently hurt and discountenanced in competitions and comparisons with the other girls in her life.
She stepped down the dark hallway and entered the living-room, where her family sat and pored over the Sunday papers. The hour was verging on noon, and the debris and confusion of a past breakfast stood on the square, uncovered table in the middle of the room. Blanche eyed it peevishly.
“Oh, for Gawd’s sake, what a dump,” she said. “How’m I going to sit down with gue and coffee all over the chairs?”
“Too bad about you,” her brother, Harry, answered, with an amiable jeer in his voice. “Too bad. We’ll move up on the Drive an’ get a lotta servunts for you, huh?”
“Sure, go ahead, but as long’s we’re not there yet you c’n move your big legs and help clean off the table,” she replied.
“Whatsamatter, you parulyzed?” he asked, still genial as he rose and picked up some of the dishes.
Her sister Mabel and her oldest brother, Philip, joined in the slangy, waggish repartee as Blanche went to the kitchen and came back with a cup of coffee and a fried egg. The father chortled behind the comic-section of one of the papers, oblivious to this usual Sunday morning “kidding-match,” and the mother was busy in the kitchen. Harry Palmer, known to the bantam-class of the prize-fighting ring as Battling Murphy, was a youth of twenty-two, with a short body whose shoulders and chest were full, hard lumps, and whose legs were thinly crooked but steel-like. His small, black eyes had a dully fixed, suspicious, partly dumb and partly cunning look that never left them, even in the midst of his greatest smiles and laughters, and his nose was shaped like the beginning of a corkscrew, and his thick lips just touched each other, with the lower one slightly protruding. His moist black hair was brushed backward; his skin was a dark brown with a dab of red running through it. The start of a primitive man, forced to become tricky and indirect as it escaped from the traps and ways of city streets, but still longing for direct blows andcurses, showed on every inch of him. He was cruel without wit enough to know that he was cruel, and in his most lenient and joking moments the little imagination and sentiment that he had grew large in its own estimation and made him feel that he was as decent and kind as he could be in a life where you had to “put it over” the other fellow, or go under.
He prided himself especially on his generous and affectionate attitude toward his family. They were the only people who had any actual claims on him—his own flesh and blood, yep—but he felt that it was necessary to hurt them whenever they objected to his actions, or tried to hold him down, or did anything that they should not have done. His idea of superiority was not to allow any one to boss him unless it contributed to his material gain, and to order people around whenever he could. Part of his family-pride was a real emotion and part of it was a dogged peace-offering to his more openly selfish and cruel words and actions to other people. He looked upon women as creatures made for his particular enjoyment, but they alone were able to revive the streak of surlily shamefaced tenderness within him, and if they were exceptionally good-looking, and besieged by troubles, he wanted to pet them and give them money. He intended to avoid marriage until he met a pretty girl of his own age, who would refuse to give herself to him, and who could hold her own in the rough parryings of conversation, and show a practical disposition and a sense of the value of money.
He had fought in preliminary six-round bouts—witherratic success—since he was twenty, and he was known to the ring as a courageous but unscientific fighter, whose main fault was that he would not train rigorously for his encounters. On the side he was associated with a gang of bootleggers, in the position of a guard who often went with them to protect their deliveries, receiving a small share of the profits. The Palmer family was mainly dependent on his support, since his other brothers and sisters did little more than pay their own expenses, and his earnings for the past two years had really lifted them to a point where they could have deserted their upper-proletarian life. His parents preferred the Ninth Avenue apartment and its surroundings, because it had been stamped into their spirits for years, and because they liked the boisterous freedoms, the lack of etiquette, and the semiunderworld plainness of their environment. He and his brothers and sisters would not have been averse to moving to “a sweller joint,” but the desire was not yet sufficiently deep to stir them to any action.
His older brother, Philip, who was twenty-five, was looked upon as the most “high-toned” member of the family. Philip worked in a neighboring drug store and studied at night to become a pharmacist, and had had two years of a high-school education. He was a tall man of much less sturdy physique than his brother, and he dressed in the manner of a lower dandy, with much fussing over cravats, shirts and suits of clothes. He had a weak face beneath his curly brown hair—the face of a sneaking philanderer, invaded a bit by kindly impulses which he tried to suppress but whichoften led to his undoing. His brown, bulging eyes, soft mouth that tried to be hard, and tilting out nose inherited from his mother—these features disputed the sneering nonchalance with which he strove to become one with the life around him. He was not naturally studious, but his brain was cautious enough to realize that he was not adapted for the more arduously physical tasks in life, and that he would have to learn—at any cost—some sheltering and fairly profitable profession. For this reason he applied himself to absorbing the details of pharmacy, with much laboring and many secret groans.
His sister Mabel was the adored young coquette of the family. They regarded Blanche as a silly, fluctuating, and slightly queer person in comparison to her sister, for Blanche made no serious effort “to play” men for their money and favors, and often went out with the poorer and more ordinary youths of the neighborhood, and revealed, in the opinion of her family, a spirit that was too jauntily reckless—too “easy.” Mabel, on the other hand, was reckless enough, with her cabaret, private club and automobile parties, but the recklessness was more a patent exuberance used to cover up an excellent canniness. Her people had the feeling that she could not be taken advantage of, and that she would play the game carefully until she landed a wealthy man willing to marry her. Physically, she was a girl of eighteen years, with her body in that fetching state of transition between budding and maturity; mentally, she was twelve years old; and emotionally, she was a woman of fifty.Girls of her kind, whose environment has been split between their homes in an almost slummy district and the falsetto battle of Broadway, become sensually wise overnight. At eighteen, Mabel was literally stuffed with tricks, and informations, and cool wiles picked up on streets and in cabarets, and her mind merely functioned as an assistant in this process. At the very bottom she was sentimental and fearful, but only an actually dire predicament could have extracted these qualities—an unexpected danger or calamity. She was close to medium height, with a slenderness made charming by an unusually full bosom, and a pale brown skin that had a sheen upon it like that on the surface of a pond, and black, bobbed hair that was curled for three or four days after each visit to the beauty parlor. Her little nose was almost straight, with hardly a trace of the Palmer curve, and her lips were loosely parted and petite, and her big, black eyes assumed the most vacantly innocent of stares, unless she was angry, when the lids half closed between dancing sparks.
Her father, William Palmer, had worked as a bartender, during the days when his country had not yet established a new and widespread class of criminals, and he had once owned a small saloon, afterwards lost through his dice and poker-playing lusts. After the advent of prohibition, he had branched out as a bootlegger, in a very modest way, but he lacked the vigor and acumen necessary to such an occupation—he was now a man of fifty-five—and the arrest of some of his cronies had frightened him into giving uphis illegal trade. Then he became the ostensible manager of his prize-fighting son, and now he did little more than hang around the gymnasiums where his son trained, dicker for a few minutes with the owners of boxing clubs, loaf around his home, and sit in all-night drinking and poker parties. He still had the remains of a once powerful body, in spite of his lowered shoulders and grayish-black hair slowly turning to baldness, and he was one of those men who hold out against dissipation with an inhuman tenacity, until near seventy, when their hearts or stomachs abruptly collapse, and they die. He was of average height and always tried to carry himself with a great, chipper bluff at youthful spryness. Upon his brown face the twisted nose which he had given to his son, Harry, stood above broad and heavy lips, and there was a piggish fixity to his often bloodshot eyes that were too little for the ample size of his head.
He was a man who lived in two worlds at the same time—that of verbal bluffing, uttered to soothe and shun the sore spots and cruel resolves in his nature, and that one in which he endlessly schemed for money and ease, and was willing to commit any legal or well-hidden crime to procure them. He would have grown wrathful if you had accused him of being dishonest, and his rage would have been quite sincere. He had practiced self-deception for such a long time that each part of him was genuinely blind to the tactics and purposes of the other part. His children were, to him, the great, living boast with which he could dismiss the world’s and his own allegations of failure. “I nevergot what I wanted but I’ll be damned if they don’t,” he sometimes muttered to himself, and the excuse that he gave himself was that their better advantages, and his own guidance, would enable them to win out in the virtues which he had transplanted within them. He had lost his own parents at an early age and had been raised in a public institution, and had been forced to work hard when he was not yet fifteen, and he doted on citing these beginnings as an explanation for all of his material failures. He had punished and commanded his children when they were still in knee trousers and short skirts—often shouting at them and beating them about the legs—and he had struggled outragedly against their gradual assumption of authority and independence, but his delight in remaining their master had finally subsided to an even stronger pleasure—that of a man who was watching the masterful qualities which his children had derived from him.
“They get it honest, all right,” he had once said to himself, after a squabble in which his son Harry, then seventeen, had threatened to knock him out. “I never took any sass from anybody myself, you bet I didn’t. They’ll never learn to fight for themselves ’f I take all the spunk and pep outa them.”
Now he clung to the gruff pose of ordering them about, but never really cared when they disregarded most of his words, or talked back to him, as long as the boys kept out of arrest and the girls did not seem to be openly or particularly unvirtuous. He suspected that his daughters had probably “gone the limit” withone or two men whom they knew, but the absence of feminine virtue to him was not a matter for agitation unless it was persistent, complete and loudly flaunted. He wanted his daughters to be “wise” and to end up in decent marriages, but he was not averse to their “cutting up” a bit, as long as they kept it well hidden. His favorite children were Harry and Mabel and he never overlooked any chance to flatter and serve them in some manner.
His wife, Kate, was the least aggressive member of the family, and her children, Philip and Blanche, held in a much-qualified way many of her characteristics. Two years younger than her husband, she was a lean and not oversturdy woman whose head rose only an inch above his shoulders. She had been a servant girl just migrated from Ireland when he—a bartender in the block in which she lived—had married her because of his inability to seduce her in spite of her meek worship of him, and because her turn of figure and her tart, fresh face had appealed to him. She had toiled most of her life, with only a short period of intermission before the birth of her first child, and she had frequently taken his drunken blows and his palpable faithlessness after the first two years of their marriage, and they had often lived in the dirtiest and most hellish of poverties when his gambling losses had reduced them to pennilessness, but something like a mangled dream had never left her spirit—not plaintive, and not precisely wistful, but more the quietness of a peasant girl never quite living in her surroundings and always longing for the strong peace of village andhill. The dream was stupid, maligned, numb—but still it persisted. She had little courage, and yet a stubborn flare of it often shot out when she was driven into a corner, and her main reliances were obstinacy and endurance. Unlike her husband, she did not share the bragging illusions which he had concerning their children, and she felt that her sons and daughters were imperfect, overwild and far too selfish, and she cared for them more because life had deprived her of all other opportunities for compensation. She favored Blanche most because Blanche seemed to her to be more of a reproduction of what she, the mother, had been in her own girlhood. It was not that she had any keen insight into her daughter’s character and needs—it was only the very cloudy but warm feeling that Blanche was more honest and “fine” than the rest of her children. Mrs. Palmer had long since ceased to love her husband, or to respect anything about him except his physical strength and his masculine braveries, but she had fallen into a rut of obedience to him, from which she lacked even the desire to extricate herself, and she preserved an attitude of bare affection, to impress her children and to keep him in good humor whenever she could. She had rigid notions concerning honesty and morality not held by the rest of her family, and she often weakly complained against their “looseness” and accepted it only because she could not change it. Below her still abundant, grayish-red hair, her face was like the seamed and puffed and violated copy of Blanche’s countenance, with much the same eyes, lips and nose,but without the hopeful smiles and uncertain questions on the other’s face.
As the family gathered in the living-room on this Sunday noon, chaffing and listening to the latest fox-trot and waltz records from the slightly nasal phonograph that stood on a shaky table in a corner of the room, and reading the papers with the jealous, spellbound attention with which obscure people greet the notorieties and “stunts” of other men and women, the mother still worked in the kitchen, cleaning the breakfast dishes and preparing the five o’clock Sunday dinner. Kate Palmer usually refused to allow her girls to help her with the housework, for more or less selfish reasons, because of her pitiful pride in the fact that she could manage things herself—the elderly housewife, to whom work had become an only distraction and importance—and because she really dreaded the possibility of their attractive, feminine hands becoming “chapped and ugly-like.” On Sundays the Palmers, in varying degrees, were always in their best mood. They had all slept later than on other days, and the Sabbath-day was associated in their spirits with “sorta making up for what you pulled off during the week”—the faint, uncomprehended return of conscience and forgotten religious precepts—and with more peaceful forms of enjoyment. Early every Sunday morning the mother went to a Presbyterian church on the outskirts of their neighborhood, and sometimes her husband or one of her daughters would accompany her, both of them stiffly empty and ill-at-ease. If you had asked all of thePalmers whether they believed in God and in Christianity, they would instantly have replied in the affirmative, after giving you a wondering, suspicious look, and yet their belief was merely the snubbed but never-quite-relinquished shield which their fears became conscious of at rare and odd moments. In case you died, you wanted to know that you were on the right side of things and in line for some possible reward—this was the only shape that religion had to them. Its exhortations and restrictions were jokes that could not possibly survive in the sordidness, and strain, and sensual longing of your life—you knew that at the bottom but you never admitted it to yourself on the top. Again, there was a consolation, dim and yet imperative, in feeling that a vast, hazy, grand Father was controlling their days, and in moments of sore need, or danger, or pain, they would have instinctively and even beseechingly called out His name.
When the papers were exhausted, the conversation of the Palmers became more steady and personal.
“Guess you’re goin’ out to-night with that Jew-kike uh yours,” said Harry, trying to get a rise out of Blanche. “Can’t you pick out somethin’ better than a Christ-killer, huh?”
“What’s it to you?” she asked, coolly. “Show you a good-looking Jewish girl and you’ll fall all over yourself trying to date her up. I know you.”
“Sure, but I’d just play her for what I could get,” answered Harry. “I’ve got a notion you’re kinda sweet on that Loo-ee Rosenberg, ’r whatever his name is.”
“Well, she’d better not be,” said the father, with a scowl. “I don’t mind when some kike takes her out for a good time—their jack’s as good as any other guy’s—but I’m not lettin’ any Jews get into this family.”
Blanche gave them a scornful smile. She was far from being in love with Rosenberg, and the matter was neither pressing nor irritating, but she felt a general defiance against their masculine habit of laying down the law to women.
“I guess I’m old enough to tend my own business, pa,” she said.
“Oh, you are, huh,” answered her father. “Well, maybe we’ll see about that.”
“Aw, I know what’s eating both of you,” said Mabel, in her expressionless, thinly liquid voice. “You’re sore ’cause Harry lost to a Jew in that fight he had up in Harlem. Kid Goldman, that’s the one. When you going to beat him up, Harry?”
“I’ll get him, I’ll get him, don’t worry,” her brother answered, frowning as he remembered the affront to his vanity. “I was outa condition that night, and my left wasn’t workin’ good, that’s all. Wait’ll I get him in the ring again.”
“You know what I’ve always told you—you got the makin’s of a champion ’f you’ll only get down to business,” said his father. “You’re trailin’ around too much with that bootleggin’ gang uh yours. No fighter ever got to the top with a bottle in his hand, I’m tellin’ you.”
“G’wan, you know damn well I’m down to the gymfive days a week,” answered Harry, who realized the truth of his father’s words, but wanted to minimize it with his own reply. “An’ what’s more, I don’t see any of you turnin’ down that fifty they slip me ev’ry Monday. Money don’t lay around on the street—you got to get it any place you can.”
“Well, I ain’t any too anxious ’bout hearin’ the cops knockin’ on this door some day,” his father responded, peevishly.
“Go ahead, drink your fool self to death—who cares,” said Mabel, who had become petulant at the thought of the grand style in which they could all live if her brother would only rise to the head of his class. “You’ve got plenty of muscle but no sense, that’s the trouble with you.”
“Say, how many times ’ve you seen me drunk, how many?” Harry asked, beginning to be angry at this exposure of his weakest trait. “Ev’ry one in this joint’s always lappin’ up all I bring home, an’ I never touch it myself. ’F I do go on a jag once’n a while it’s my business. You can’t get up in the fight game unless you’re on the inside—there’s too many big crooks higher up fixin’ things.”
“I don’t believe it—you’re just looking for a way out,” said Blanche, to whom Harry was a generous but conceited brother—a strong, vicious baby who imagined himself to be a model of shrewdness. At the bottom she disliked his bulldozing, prying ways, but her dislike was not yet strong enough to overcome the more enforced feelings of gratitude and blood-ties within her heart. Harry always suspectedthat Blanche was the one member of his family not impressed by his prowess and his knowledge of the world, and he never gave up his efforts to increase her respect, with all the argument and repartee at his command.
“I am, huh,” he said, answering her last remark. “What do you know about it? I suppose you get all that info’ uh yours punchin’ the cash register down at the cafeteria. The only way you’re wise is with your mouth. That middle-weight champ fight down at the Terrace was fixed up a week ago and I’ve got it straight. Just watch the papers tuhmorrow night.”
“Aw, I’ve heard a lotta roomors goin’ around, but that’s hot air,” said his father. “Garvey’d be a damn fool to sell his title for any amount—I don’t care ’fit’s one hundred thousan’. He ain’t had it a year yet, an’ there’s plenty uh holes left in the meal-ticket.”
“Listen to somethin’, will yuh,” answered Harry, who really knew what he was talking about in this matter. “Garvey’s gonna give up the title now and then win it back in a return bout. Lose it on a foul an’ raise a big holler—that’s the scheme. Young Anderson’ll keep it f’r a year ’r so, an’ make a pile of dough cleanin’ up all the suckers in the sticks. With the movie stuff an’ the easy pickin’s he’ll rake in three times ’s much as his manager give Garvey’s tuh fix it all up. I got it from a guy who was there when they all talked it over, only I can’t say his name ’cause I’d get my bean drilled through ’f they ever found out I told.”
“Are you kiddin’ me?” demanded his father.
“I hope to croak if I am!”
“Oh, boy, watch me put thirty dollars on that fight,” cried Philip, who had been sitting beside his father and listening avidly.
“Well, go slow, go slow,” advised his father. “I know Harry wouldn’t give us a bum stir, but them agreements ’r’ often bungled up ’r double-crossed at the last minnit.”
The men began a discussion of prize-fighting conditions in general, with much vehemence and a comical contrast of naive and foxy opinions, and the two girls brought out manicure-sets of flashy celluloid, and fiddled with their nails. Something that was not depression but unobtrusively akin to it, stirred inside of Blanche. She had felt it at times before and had never been able to fathom it beyond her sense that life was too underhanded, and that she didn’t like this aspect of it. As she listened to the men, with their endless recitals of frauds and machinations, the little weight moved within her breast. Fake, fake, fake—that was all you ever heard. Wasn’t there anything honest and good in the world? It sure didn’t look like there was, most of the time. Oh, well, why bother so much about it? You could never get along in this world unless you “belonged”—unless you were like the things around you.
She started to think of Louis Rosenberg, the man with whom she had an engagement for the coming night. She didn’t love him, sure not, but he wasn’t a bad fellow at that. He seemed to be an honest boy, and sometimes he talked about big, fancy things, likewhy people hated each other so much, and why the world wasn’t better than it was, and he used a word now and then that he called art—something that made people write books and do paintings and statuary, and get wild over nothing that any one else could see. He certainly was different from most men all right. He kissed her sometimes, but he never tried to “get fresh” (getting fresh, to Blanche, was the placing of a man’s hands upon any covered part of her body except the arms). Maybe that was why she didn’t love him. He was too darn good, and a girl wanted a fellow to “try something” now and then, if he was slow about it and didn’t act as though he expected her to fall for him (respond to him) immediately. Then, when he did try it, she could tell just how much she cared for him, and she repulsed him, or accepted him to some extent, according to how nervous and glad he made her feel. Well, anyway, there were always enough men who tried to make advances to her, and Rosenberg was something of a relief.
She met him that night on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, where the theater lights clustered like bits of a soul burning in oil, and an endless, crawling stream of automobiles and taxicabs hid the pavement, and where the tall, rectangular buildings and the suavely gaudy shops seemed to be the only unexcited and unsensual objects of the scene. Rosenberg scarcely ever called for her at the apartment, and when he did he waited outside on the stoop, because Blanche felt that she would be “mortifiedto death” if her father and her brothers should choose to act unfriendly toward him, and she didn’t want to run the risk of such an occurrence. She was wearing a very thin, short-sleeved, georgette dress that extended only two inches below her knees and was of dull white with a dark red flower-pattern, and semi-transparent, flesh-colored stockings, and brown shoes with high heels, and a black felt hat shaped like an upside-down cup, with a red bow at the side. Like many girls in her environment, she dressed with a combination of unconscious artistry and cheap, over-flashy display.
Rosenberg was a youth of twenty-three, who worked at the receiving desk in one of the Public Library branches, and was beginning to think a bit too much for his happiness, prodded by the “higher literature” that he was reading for the first time. Previous to his Library job he had worked as a shoe salesman and had given it up because he had failed to see that he was “getting anywhere” and because he wanted to do something out of the ordinary but didn’t know quite what it should be. He lived with a family of brothers and sisters, and they, together with his parents, regarded him as a pleasant “schlemiel,” who was always talking about things but never accomplishing anything, though they were willing to let him alone as long as he worked and supported himself. He had met Blanche at the cafeteria where she worked as a cashier on weekdays, through the expedient of opening a gradual conversation with her as he paid his check each noon. Finally he had grown bold enoughto ask if he could “take her out” and she had assented because she had liked the diffident style in which his request was worded.
He was tall and narrow-shouldered, but he was wiry and his arms were not unmuscular. His light brown face, with its hooked nose, dark, large-lidded eyes, and thin mouth, often had the look of a puzzled dreamer, bowing to practical barriers but still trying, half-heartedly, to peer beyond them. In his attire he wavered between negligence and neatness, his tastes running to dark suits and loose collars and brightly striped shirts, and his leading vanity was his wavy black hair, which he often combed for ten minutes at a stretch.
Since the hour was only eight o’clock—still too early for them to visit the lower Broadway dance-hall which they frequented—Blanche and Rosenberg walked over to Bryant Park and sat on one of the wooden-iron benches along the cement walk and looking out on the orderly, clipped levels of grass. The late spring night, with its warm air that had the barest threat of coolness in it, and its cloudless sky dotted with stars and a moon at which you could glance now and then with the feeling that they were pretty and a bit mystifying, and the more immediate lights around you, with their warm, come-on-and-see-what’s-under-me winks, and all the sounds of pleasure-seeking traffic—these things brought Blanche a light-hearted, knowing mood. She was a girl, young and rather handsome, and there was nothing that shecouldn’t make men do if she had only cared enough about it.
“Tell you what we’ll do, Lou, we’ll take that ferry ride over to Staten Island,” she said. “I love to get out on the water when it’s night.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” he answered, moodily.
“Gee, I never saw a fellow like you,” she replied. “Dance, dance, that’s all you care about. Here I know you’re short on money, and here I’m giving you a chance to get away with forty cents for the night—four thin dimes—and you turn it down.”
“Don’t always rub in how poor I am,” he said, nettled. “’F I was so darn crazy about money, like other guys are, I’d get it all right. There’s other things I’m interested in—books, and good plays, and watching what other people do. They all call me lazy at home, but it don’t bother me any. I don’t see that they get so much out of life by working their heads off all the time.”
Blanche felt a little scornful and a little inquiring as she listened to him. Who ever heard of saying that people shouldn’t work—what would become of them if they didn’t? Besides, what did he get out of all his reading and this “think-ing” of his? He was a boob in many respects, and in a way she was wasting her time with him. She could have been in the company of men who could show her an actual good time—high-class cabarets and automobile parties, and the best theaters and restaurants. Yet, after she went out with these men for a while she always grew tired of them. They all got down to what they wanted fromher, and it became a bald question of taking or rejecting them—you couldn’t “string them along” forever—and they all lacked something that she was unable to put her finger on—something “classy” and aboveboard and decent without being goody-goodish. When she “let them go too far,” under the hilarious urge of liquor, she never felt quite right about it afterwards. She could never rid herself of the feeling that the man had not deserved what he had received and that she had been just another girl on his list. Rosenberg was the one man who came nearest to fulfilling this mysterious lack, but he was deficient in all of the other requisites, and his physical appeal was weak to her.
“Well, you don’t read a book when you dance, do you?” she asked at last, desiring to take a mild jab at him. “Gee, but you’re the cat’s something. I wish you had more get-up about you.”
“Yeh, it’s too bad I haven’t got a roll,” he answered. “Sometimes I b’lieve that’s all you girls think about.”
An anger mounted within her.
“Say, ’f I did, why’d I have to pick you out?” she asked. “You make me sick and tired!”
“Aw, don’t get so sore,” he replied. “I’m touchy in one spot, that’s all. Let’s talk about something else. I was reading a book called First Street the other day—it’s highbrow, you know, but it’s darn popular, too. I hear they’ve sold a hundred thousand. It tells all about how gossipy-like and narrow-minded and, oh, just small, people are—the people that live in those little burgs.... Say, the more I find out aboutthis world of ours the less I like it. Why the devil can’t people leave each other alone, and do what they want, long’s they’re not hurting anybody.”
His last words made Blanche sympathize with him, in spite of the fact that, to her, there was an unmanly element in what he said. Real men, now, went out and fought with each other, and “stood the gaff” and “got what was coming to them” and made people obey them. Still there was too darn much bossing in the world, with ev’rybody sticking his finger in the other person’s pie. Her family was always nagging at her, and the owner of the cafeteria was always telling her what to do—thought he owned her for his measly twenty-two a week—and the cop on the corner gave you a rotten look if he saw you walking alone late at night ... yes, too darn much bossing to suit her.
“What’s that there word, narruh-mindud, ’r something like that—what’s it mean?” she asked.
“It means when you don’t see nothing except what’s right in front of your eyes,” he answered, delighted at the chance to show his wisdom. “That’s what ails most of us, all right. When you’re narrow-minded, you see, you want everybody to be like you are and you go right up in the air when people don’t act the way you do. That’s what it means.”
“But you’ve got to be like other people ’r else you’ll never get anywheres,” she said, uncertainly.
“Well, yes, in lots of things,” he answered, “but just the same you can’t be arrested for what’s going on in your head. You c’n have all the ideas you wantto, ’s long as you don’t pull off any crime, ’r bother anybody.”
She liked the queerness of his words, for no discernible reason other than that he seemed to be in favor of “standing up for yourself,” and not always believing what people told you. Not so bad at that, only—try—and—do—it! Oh, well, what did all this have to do with the night ahead of them? This funny boy was her escort for the night, and she was a desirable woman, and she wished that he would “cut out” all of the heavy stuff and make love to her, or pay her some compliments, or do something that men did when they were “gone” on a girl.
“Say, you never kill yourself paying any attention tome,” she said, after a pause. “It’s always them i-i-deeuhs uh yours. Why, I know piles uh men that would jump all over themselves just for the chance to sit ’longside uh me here.”
He had been looking away from her, and now he turned his head, stung, and sorrowfully hungry, and much more upset than he dared to confess to himself, as he took in the appetizing, fresh sauciness of her face, and the suggestive witchcraft of her pent-up breast. There was a come-and-get-me-if-you’re-able, and an almost smiling expression on her face. Without realizing it, he always made an additional effort to talk about “deep things” when he was with her, to escape from the unsteadying influence which she had upon his emotions. The other girls whom he occasionally took to moving-picture theaters and dances, were more or less inviting to him according to theshape of their faces—he was fond of very plump cheeks and lips with a large fullness to them—and whether they had ample but not too corpulent forms—but otherwise he did not differentiate them, except in the light of whether they were “good kidders” (brightly loquacious about nothing in particular) or unduly silent and tiresome. Blanche, however, incited within him a quick-rhythmed trouble and respect which he could not explain, outside of his desire to embrace her. She never seemed to have much “brains,” but still he felt that there was something to her that life hadn’t given her a chance to develop—something honest and undismayed.
He had no actual ability at clear thinking, in spite of all of his poor little defiances and boldnesses abstracted from this book and that, but he did have a questioning, dissatisfied spirit—a spirit prone to quick melancholies and even quicker hopes, and always trying to “find out what it all meant.” He had the desire to make Blanche worthy of him, and to give her the knowledges and bystandish rebukes toward life on which he prided himself. He told himself that he was an idealist in sexual matters and that he was waiting for a girl who could show him a clean, aspiring, beautiful love, free from all coquetries and hagglings, and he used the impressive adjectives to serenade his sense of sexual frustration. In reality, he was oversexed, and not bold enough to capture the girls whom he secretly desired, but that was not the whole of it—far beneath him he really did long for a physical outlet that would be much less sordid and common thanthe ones within his reach. At rare intervals he would visit some professional woman, whose card had been given to him by one of his more rakish friends, and go away from her with a relieved but downcast mood.
While he felt that he was in love with Blanche, he didn’t want to be too quick about telling her—you had to wait and be sure that some other girl, even more alluring, wouldn’t come along—and since she didn’t seem to be in love with him, his pride made him silent at the thought of a probable rejection. Often, when he kissed her good-night, his longing to “go farther” would be close to overpowering him, but at this moment she always slipped efficiently out of his arms and said her last farewell. To Blanche, kisses of any length were equivalents to saying “yes.”
As Rosenberg sat beside Blanche now, after her girlishly taunting words, he lost control of himself for the first time, and his hand dropped tightly on one of her knees, but she rose instantly from the bench. She wasn’t angry at his having become “fresh” because she blamed herself for it, but at the same time she didn’t want to encourage him. He was a nice enough kid, but somehow when he touched her she didn’t get any “kick” out of it.
“Not here, Lou—c’mon, let’s go,” she said, trying to put a look of cajoling promise on her face.
They walked over to “Dreamland,” the place where they usually danced. It was a moderately large hall, where the admission price was only two dollars for couples, and it catered to a nondescript array of patrons. Those who attended it regularly were in themain young blades with small salaries and gay ambitions, and working-girls who desired to “step out” at night, but you could spy a variety of other people who dropped in occasionally. The place hired twelve professional girl dancers, who sat on a row of green wicker chairs and waited for customers, and there was a booth wherein a lady, who looked like a middle-aged, superannuated burlesque actress, dispensed tickets, each of which entitled the bearer to a dance with one of the hired girls. Three or four professional male dancers in tuxedoes lolled opposite the girls and waited for feminine patrons. They were mostly in demand for the tango and the Charleston—more intricate dances which most of the other men present had not mastered. Prosperous, middle-aged business men frequently dropped in to dance with the girl “hostesses” and a buxom, overripe, overdressed, smirking woman—who supervised this part of the hall’s activities—went through the respectable farce of inquiring each gentleman’s name and introducing him to his “hostess” partner. Many youths, “hard up” for the evening and desiring an excellent and “swell-looking” dancer, and many out-of-town visitors, pining for deviltry during the vacation from their families, were also frequent patrons. In addition, a large number of unattached men drifted about the hall and solicited dances from single girls, who accepted or rejected them according to whether they were well-dressed and talked with the proper confident, wise-cracking inflections. The dance floor covered almostone-half of the hall’s space and was separated by a wooden railing from the remainder of the place.
With its bright green wicker armchairs, and floor of dark red plush, and varicolored electric lights hanging in bunches from the ceiling, and badly done paintings of women and cherubs and flowers on the surface of the walls, and canopied, bedecked platform at one side of the dance floor, where eight jazz players performed, the hall gave you the general effect of spurious romance putting on its best front to hide the decay of its heart. The aura of respectability that hung over the place was an amusing and desperate deception. Two guards stood on the dance floor and reprimanded couples when they shimmied, or moved with a too undulating slowness, and other attendants watched the rows of wicker chairs and censored any open “spooning” among the patrons, and yet the hall was quite patently an inception-ground for rendezvous, and assignations, and flirtations, and covert flesh-pressures. The “hostesses” took soft drinks with their steadiest partners, at one end of the hall, with much touching of knees and flitting of hands under the tables, to induce the men to spend more freely—overrouged and lip-sticked girls, with bobbed hair and plump faces where sex had become the most automatic and shallow of signals. They wore short evening gowns, sleeveless and with low necks, and they “innocently” crossed their legs to show an inch or two of bare flesh above their rolled-up, thinnest stockings, and then uncrossed them again when they perceived that some man was staring at the exposure, keepingup these back-and-forth movements as though an innuendo with springs and wheels had replaced all of the sexual spontaneity within them.
Blanche and Rosenberg danced again and again to the jerky, moaning, truculently snickering ache and dementia of the music. To Blanche, dancing was the approved, indirect way in which you could relieve your sex without compromising it, and as she was hugged tightly against Rosenberg, he became desirable to her because the music and steps transformed him and cast a rhythmical glamor upon his body. She had the same feeling with any man with whom she danced, unless he was old or inept, and when she danced with a man who was physically attractive off the dance floor as well, the sensation rose to an all-conquering and haughty semiecstasy. Then she held her head high, and closed her eyes occasionally, and wished that darkness would suddenly descend on the floor.
After their first few dances, Blanche and Rosenberg sat down, breathless, and without a thought in their heads. To Rosenberg, dances were opportunities to embrace a girl without interference or remonstrance, but beyond that the music made him feel that he was capering on the divine top of the world, where such dull and mournful things as jobs, and money worries, and alarm clocks, and family quarrels had been deliciously left behind.
In front of Blanche, a bulky, short man, in a dark suit with the latest wide-bottomed trousers, was trying “to make” a dark, barely smiling girl, slender anddressed in a clinging gray gown, who refused to answer his remarks.
“Gee, I’m as popular around here as the German measles,” he said loudly.
The girl smiled more apparently but failed to answer him.
“Listen, just try me once,” he begged. “Just one dance. I’ll pay the doctor bills if I make you sick. I’m a good sport.”
The girl smiled more widely but still remained silent.
“Will somebody tell me why I’m living?” he queried to the air above her head. “Boy, but it’s cold to-night! I left the old automatic at home so I can’t die just yet, girlie. Come on, just one dance, will you?”
By this time the girl was fully convinced of his glib-tongued, regular-guy status, and felt that he had implored enough to serve as a sufficient payment for his dance. She rose, without a word, and accompanied him to the floor. Similar episodes were being enacted around Blanche and Rosenberg, and he said, with a grin: “It sure gets me when I listen to what you girls fall for. That’s why I lose out—I hate to talk that kind of line.”
“Oh, go on, you’d do it if you could,” answered Blanche. “A girl always likes a fellow ’f he knows how to be funny and don’t carry it too far. You know what I mean. I never was so crazy ’bout this kidding stuff myself, but then maybe that’s why you like me, isn’t it, Lou?”
“You’ve got something in you, all right,” he replied.“You don’t know so much more’n other girls, but you make me feel that you’re diff’rent, anyway. I guess it’s because you don’t put up so much bluffing and leading a fellow on, like other girls do.”
She laughed to hide her pleasure at the compliment, and because another part of her said inaudibly: “Oh, I don’t, eh? Well, I’ll show you, before I’m through!”
“You’re a funny fellow, but I’ve met them worse than you,” she said.
They danced until 1A.M., after which he escorted her to the apartment. As they stood in the musty, narrow, dimly lit hallway, an emotion like a Roman-candle spun around in his breast, and for the first time he grasped her with rough, active hands, and breathed hard as he whispered short, incoherent pleadings. She pushed him back with an undeniable anger and force which made him grow still and dismayed, and they stood for a moment, looking at each other.
“So, you’re like all the rest of ’em,” she said. “What do you think I am? You’ve got your nerve, you have. You can’t put your hands on me that way, and don’t forget it!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he answered, downcast. “I didn’t mean to act like that, but something got the better of me. I couldn’t think of anything except I wanted you. I’m in love with you, Blanche, and I guess I didn’t know it till just now. I’d ask you to marry me to-morrow ’f I had money enough to keep us going.”
She softened at this switch to a “decent” proposal, and she reproached herself for having flirted too muchwith him without loving him or caring a great deal for his embraces. She liked to hear him talk, but when he touched her he was awkward and hasty, and without that winning blend of confidence and gradual boldness which she liked in a man’s approaches.
“I s’pose it’s my fault, too,” she said. “I don’t love you, Lou, but I do like you lots. Maybe I will some time. How c’n any girl be sure about that? I don’ want to stop going with you ’f you’ll just try to be friends with me, Lou.”
He stood for a moment without answering—discouraged and resentful. Somehow he never seemed to get anything that he really wanted—what was the use of it all. She li-iked the way he talked, oh, yes, but she preferred to save herself for some empty-pated cake-eater, some know-it-all fellow with a straight nose and a bunch of bum jokes and a string of promises about what he was going to do for her.
“Oh, I’ll try,” he said at last, “but I can’t see why you don’t care for me. I’ve got just as good a head as any one else you know, and I’m not so terrible looking, and I know you wouldn’t turn me down just ’cause I’m poor.”
“I cert’nly wouldn’t,” she replied. “I can’t tell you why I don’t love you—it’s just not there, that’s all. I think you’re a nice boy, really I do, and I want to keep seeing you, but what’s the use of letting you do things to me when it don’t mean nothing?... I’ve got to go upstairs now—I feel like I could sleep ten hours. We sure did dance a lot to-night. Listen, callme up next Thursday noon, at the caf’, and we’ll go some place Thursday night.”
“All right, I’ll give you a ring,” he answered, dully. “I guess you can’t help how you feel, Blanche.”
He kissed her good-night, and she let his lips stay for a while, out of pity, and then broke away from him. As she went to bed, she had a muddled, wondering feeling—why did she always turn down boys that were “good” and willing to marry her, and why didn’t she object to the embraces of “bad” men, who were just looking for an easy prospect? Maybe she was a little “bad” herself—a little like May Harrigan, whose name was the jest of the neighborhood, and who grabbed any young fellow that came along.... Her perturbations faded out into sleep.
On the next morning she was still a bit glum at the cafeteria, but it was no more than the least of shadows as she exchanged glances and repartee with various customers who paid their checks. When she sat before the cash register, her business-like tension extended even to the sexual side of her, and she uttered her set phrases merely to dispose of the men who talked to her, and with little interest in their faces and words. During the lull-hours, however, between two and four in the afternoon, she relaxed, and the appraising tingles of her sex came back, and she entered into badinage with the proprietor and the counter-men and stray customers whom she knew. Her confined perch on the cashier’s stool had to be forgotten in some way.
The cafeteria had rows of brightly varnished chairswith broad arms, and tables with white, enameled tops, and a sprinkle of sawdust on the tiled floor. Pyramids of oranges and grapefruit stood in the windows, and the glass-walled food counters were heaped with pastry, cold meats and trays of salads and puddings. The smell of soggy, overspiced food and body-odors possessed the air, and a spirit of dreamless, hasty, semidirty devouring hung over the place. On this afternoon, Blanche was chatting with the proprietor, a tall Jew of forty years, with a jowled, bloodless face, killed black eyes that were always shifting about in the fear that they might be missing something, and the thickest of lips. His coat was off and he wore an expensive, monogramed silk shirt of green and white stripes, and had a cigar forever in his mouth or hand.
“Check up yet on the accounts?” he asked.
“Yep, ev’rything’s straight,” she answered.
“Say, I bought a beauty of uh coat f’r my wiff yesterday,” he said. “She can’t say I ever hold out onher.”
“Well, isn’t that nice—she must be tickled to death,” said Blanche, giving him the flattering words that he wanted to hear. “Nobody ever slips me any swell coats.”
“Well, if they don’t it’s your fault,” he replied. “You could work a fellow f’r anything you wanted—you’ve got the goods, all right.”
“Aw, quit your kidding,” she said. “I wouldn’t take no prizes in a beauty show.”
“You would if I was one uh the judges,” he answered.
He poked her in the side, playfully, and she smiled carefully. You had to take such things from your boss—it was all in the game—but you wished that he would keep his hands to himself—the fat old lobster.
“Any time you wanna take a little ride in my machine, it’s there,” he said.
“Gee, I’d be afraid of you,” she retorted. “I think you’resomedevil, you are.”
He chuckled at the praise of his masculine gifts, and walked back to the kitchen in response to a call. The cafeteria was located in a manufacturing and wholesale district where practically all of the trade occurred around the noon hour, and it closed its doors at 6P.M.When Blanche returned to the apartment, Harry, Philip and Mabel were sitting at the supper-table (the father happened to be visiting one of his cronies uptown).
“Say, I met a guy to-day said he saw you at Dreamland las’ night,” said Philip, when Blanche came to the table.
“Uh-huh, I was there,” said Blanche.
“Well, I wouldn’t be seen in a bum joint like that,” Mabel commented. “You certainly have a gift f’r pickin’ out the penny-squeezers, Blanie. Me f’r the Club Breauville, ’r places like that. They put on the best show you ever saw—Hawkins ’n Dale, straight from the Palace Theater, and a big, A-number-one chorus.”
“Aw, rats, you’re always worrying what a fella’s going to spend on you,” said Blanche. “They’ve got a peach of a jazz-band at Dreamland, and a dandy floor—that’s all I care about.”
“Your tastes ’r sim-ply aw-ful,” Mabel answered, “and what’s more, why shouldn’t a girl go with high-class fellas and have ’em spend piles on her? That’s what they’re made for.”
“Well, I don’t blame you none,” said Philip, “but believe me, I’d never pick out a wife like you. You sure would keep a fella on the go digging it up for you.”
“Mabel don’t mean anything by it,” said his mother, who had come in from the kitchen, “but I wish she wouldn’t stay out so late. I get to worryin’ when she comes home three an’ four an’ five in the mornin’. You never can tell what’ll happen to a girl in this city.”
“Aw, ma, don’t fret, I can take care of myself,” Mabel said.
“That’s what they all say,” Harry broke in. “I was talkin’ to a fella to-day, said his kid sister got into a scrape out in Jersey. Two guys started scrappin’ over her in a machine, and one of ’em’s dyin’ in the hospital, and the bulls ’r after her. It was in the papers yesterday. You better watch y’r step, Mabe.”
“Listen, no girl ’cept a fool would go out in a machine with two guys,” answered Mabel. “I’ll take ’em one at a time, believe me.”
“Well, I do think you’re too free with the men, an’ you only eighteen,” her mother said, looking at Mabel in a ruefully helpless way. “It’s I that can’t hold youdown, and it’s I that never could, but I’m wishin’ you’d stay home once’n a while. How’ll you ever get a decint man to make a decint proposal to you, how’ll you ever, runnin’ round with that fast crowd uh yours?”
“G’wan, she’ll land a big one yet, ’fore she’s through,” said Harry. “Mabe’s a wise girlie, and I’m with her all the time!”
“Same here,” Mabel answered affectionately, as she pulled her brother’s hair.
“I s’pose I’m the boob uh this fam’ly,” said Blanche, “but I won’t lose no sleep over it. ’F I like the way a man talks, ’n how he looks, I don’t care what’s the size of his roll.”
“You got it from me, you did,” her mother said, with a dully soft look. “It’s I that married your father when he hadn’t a cent to his name. ’Twas the way he could blarney, ’twas that, and ’twas the face of him that made me take him.”
“Aw, pa’s all right, but he’s shy on brains,” Mabel said. “’F I ever get hooked up with any man he’s got to have plenty uh money, and then some. I’m worth all the dough in the world ’cordin’ to my way uh thinkin’, and I’m not scrubbin’ floors for no fella this year ’r next. This lovin’-up stuff don’t get you much.”
“Yeh, Blanche is a mut with alla her Rosinburgs, ’n Kellies, ’n all the rest uh them tin-horn pikers,” said Harry. “I know how she’ll wind up, all right. Some guy’ll have her washin’ his clothes an makin’ her like it!”
“Ma’s been washing yours and pa’s for years, but you’re not kicking about that,” answered Blanche.“Anyway it won’t be some one like you. You think that row-mance is something people clean their shoes with, you do. You’ve got a heart like a oyster, I’ll say.”
“Row-ma-ance, that’s good,” answered Harry, derisively. “Try an’ cash in on it at the butcher shop an’ see what you get.”
“Well, I’m on Blanie’s side,” said Philip, who liked his older sister because she was “softer” than the other members of the family. “When I marry a girl she’s got to love me, first, last, ’n’ all the time. I’m strong for the jack, sure, but there’s other things hanging around.”
“Say, isn’t Joe Campbell comin’ up to-night?” asked Mabel, turning to Blanche.
“Yeh, I’ve got a date with him f’r eight-thirty.”
“Now there’s a guy you oughta play up to,” said Harry. “He takes down a good three hundred a week f’r that turn he does up at The Golden Mill. Joe’s as wise as they make ’em—a wise-crackin’ baby. I’m gonna stick around when he comes up here to-night. He c’n get a laugh outa me any day in the year.”
“Joe’s there, all right,” Mabel said. “I wish he wasn’t so sweet on Blanche.”
“Well, go after him, dearie, if that’s how you feel,” Blanche answered. “It won’t be breaking my heart.”
As she dressed herself for the coming engagement, Blanche had an uneven, up-in-the-air song in her blood. Another man would soon be courting her, and casting “I’d-like-to-get-you” looks at her, and deferring to her just as much as if she had been famous or wealthy, andpraising her to lead up to attempted caresses, while she sat in judgment on the proceedings, with a queenly “I’ll-have-to-see-about-this” sensation, and remarks made of “slams” and retirings to put him on his mettle, and the feeling of owning the world for a few, high-keyed hours, until she returned to her bed and the more level-headed endurance-test at the cafeteria. Her head was totally empty for a time, and she sang the popular tunes of the day, in a low, contralto voice, as she fussed about with her toilette. Then glimpses of Joe Campbell appeared in her head, and she wondered whether she would ever marry him. She liked him physically, and she respected his money-making talents, but her response toward him was much stronger when he was with her. His absence seemed to remove a black-art spell, and to leave in its place doubts and confusions. Then, beneath all of his good-humors and effulgent generosities, she divined an insincerity and something that spoke of shrouded, patiently crouching intentions. What they were she did not know. Her mind was not capable of delving into this reaction, and it told her only that he wasn’t “coming out” with his real self. Her brother had introduced him to her six months previous to this night, and since then Campbell had pursued her in an irregular way, since he frequently left New York on vaudeville-bookings. She had allowed him certain physical liberties and had admonished herself afterwards for being “too easy,” but the matter had rested there, since he had never been remarkably insistent in his efforts to vanquish her.
When he came up, and airily saluted her, Harryand Mabel, who were in the living-room, greeted him effusively. They considered it an honor that this minor Broadway favorite, whose name was occasionally in electric lights, should be so willing to visit them and “step out of his class.”
“’Lo, Joe, still bringin’ down the house?” asked Mabel.
“Nothing but,” he replied. “The bulls came running into the place last night, looking for a free-for-all fight, the clapping was that loud.”
Mabel and Harry laughed, and Harry said: “C’mon, I bet you coulda heard a maxim-silencer after you got through.”
“That’s the same gun they shoot off when you get through fighting, isn’t it?” asked Campbell, with a solemn look.
“You win,” answered Harry, laughing again.
“Well, I’ve got to go now,” Mabel said. “Papa doesn’t like to be kept waitin’, you know.”
“Be sure and don’t leave him anything,” Campbell replied. “A girl got expelled from the Flappers’ Union the other day—they all got sore at her because she overlooked a ten-spot in the upper vest-pocket.”
“You’re talkin’ to the president of the Union—don’t be funny,” answered Mabel.
Blanche joined in the laughter now and then—Campbell’s humor was hard to resist. A stocky man of medium height, whose feet were always tapping the floor as though they had a light itch to be dancing, he rarely ever departed from the bon-mots that constituted his chief stock-in-trade. His mind was intelligent in worldlyways, and a blank otherwise, but he was quite aware of his ignorances and careful not to expose them. He had a long, narrow face, with a slanting nose, mobile lips, and a twinkling, lazy cruelty in his eyes. His thick brown hair was burnished and pasted down on his head, and he wore the latest, loose-trousered clothes, in shades of gray and brown, with multicolored scarves, and a diamond ring on one of his fingers. He was a coarse sensualist grown careless from many feminine captures, and he had held back in Blanche’s regard from the feeling that she would “have to come to him first.” Still, he was becoming aware of an increasing urge toward her, moved by something in her face and figure that “hit it off just right.” She wasn’t nearly as pretty as tens of Broadway girls whom he knew, but she had an unspoiled swerve and sturdiness that attracted him, and in addition, he felt that she knew much more than many other women of his acquaintance—that she was not quite as shallow, or as palpably scheming, as most of his retinue were.
He left the apartment with her, and they hailed a taxicab and were driven to his cabaret off Upper Broadway. His turn only came on at eleven o’clock when the after-theater crowd poured into the place, and he sat with Blanche at one of the tables, and endlessly greeted his “friends,” and adulterated glasses of ginger-ale with the contents of a silver flask carried in his hip-pocket.
The Golden Mill was a resplendent, baroque cabaret, with a large, electrically lit windmill, made of gold silk stretched over a framework, standing over thestage. The jazz-band sat just below the stage, between the carpeted runways on which the performers descended to the dance floor. Men and women, half of them in evening clothes, chattered and laughed at the surrounding tables, with a macabre heartiness that sometimes lessened to betrayals of the underlying dullness.
The whisky began to knock about in Blanche’s heart to a cruelly victorious feeling—Campbell thought he was so darn smart, didn’t he? Well, he’d have to go some to get her, just the same. Girls were always falling for a celebrity of his kind, and she’d treat him to a novelty. Still, he made her laugh and forget the rest of her world, and she didn’t mind if he caressed her to a certain extent (not too much and not too little).
“Y’know, you’re a royal-flush to me,” said Campbell. “I’d win the pot with you, any day in the year.”
“You’ll win the air ’f you get too gay,” she answered, merrily.
“Now is that nice?” he queried, in tones of mock-reproach. “Daddy’ll do anything for you—anything you want.”
“I’m not taking things from men this year,” she replied.
“Isn’t she smart—keeps count of the years ’n’ everything,” he said. “You’ll stop counting when you get to be thirty, old dear.”
“Is that the place where you stopped?” she asked.
Campbell winced secretly—he was thirty-five and not particularly elated about it. Blanche always talkedbetter under the influence of liquor—it loosened her tongue and unearthed an effervescence in her mind: keen as far as it went.
“Take that knife away, Annette;—it’s killing me,” he responded, in quavering, melodramatic tones.
Blanche took another sip from her highball.
“D’y’know, I may get crazy some time and ask you to marry me,” he said.
“That’s too bad—it must be worrying you a lot,” answered Blanche. “I never lose my head that way, so look out.”
“But really, I’m strong for you,” he went on. “It’s all in fun most of the time with me, but you’re at the top of the list.”
“I’d hate to bet on your meaning it,” said Blanche, a bit more softly.
“Don’t do it, you couldn’t get any odds,” he answered.
He chucked her under the chin and she slapped his hand.
“What nervous ha-ands you’ve got,” she said.
“Come on, act as though you didn’t like it,” he retorted.
“That’s the best thing I do,” she replied.
They continued the bantering, with the occasional interruption of a fox-trot, until his “turn” came on, when he left her with an acquaintance of his—a harmless, hero-worshiping chorus man in a dark suit, whose ruddy, regular-featured face had a look that was perilously near to a pout. Then Campbell appeared in white duck trousers, a dark blue coat, black shoes,and a panama-straw hat, and did clog-dances, and sang in a hard tenor voice, at the head of a bare-legged chorus dressed in very short boyish trousers of red, and indigo low-necked vests, and gaudy caps slanting on their heads. He was a nimble dancer and had a powerful voice, and could have risen to a point near the head of his profession, if laziness and undue dissipation had not held him down. When his act had finished and he had cleaned the make-up from his face, he returned to the table and remained there with Blanche until 2A. M.After they left the place they entered a cab and he said: “What d’you say to coming up to my joint for a while—I’m harmless, girlie, I won’t make you cry on mother’s shoulder.”
“You are, and you’re going to stay that way,” she answered. “C’mon now, tell James to drive over to Ninth Avenue, old dear.”
He made a grimace and did as she requested. He’d get her yet, no fear, but there was no need for hurrying. It was always a fatal move to expostulate with a woman at such a juncture. Again, she wasn’t important enough tohimfor any come-downs.
In the taxicab, he hugged and kissed her, and though she made little resistance, an alertness contended against the liquor-fumes in her head and counseled her to “look out.” As they stood in the hallway of her building he became a trifle bolder, and she was passive for a while and then stopped him. It wasn’t easy to hold out against him, and she had barely been able to check the rising dizziness within her, but she simply couldn’t let him win her as lightlyas this. She had not drunk sufficiently to reach a gigglingly helpless mood, although everythingdidseem to be jovially unimportant, and a dislike of him rose within her. He was too confident, he was. She’d teach him a lesson, she would, in spite of all of his physical appeal and his pleasant nerviness.
“You’re a little too fast—I can’t keep up with you,” she said. “Besides, I’m getting the willies standing here all the time. Be a good boy now, and let me go upstairs.”
“All right, girlie—game’s over,” he replied, gracefully taking his defeat. “How about next Saturday—eight ’r so?”
“That suits, I’ll be on deck,” she said.
He kissed her again and went out to the waiting taxicab. As she entered her room she had a droopy, misty feeling. Oh, well, another man turned down—what didsheget out of it, anyway? It was funny, you wanted to and you didn’t want to at the same time. She blinked at herself in the mirror, and then turned out the light and went to sleep.