XIX
THE Coney Island that they landed on is gone now. It was a shouting gypsy fair of side shows, beer gardens, dance halls, chowder tents, shooting galleries and unsavory “joints.” It was not a sweet resort, but “Shine” walked through it, like an old graduate through the corridors of his college, fondly reminiscent. He laughed at the “ballyhoo man” drawing the crowd to a booth with his sword-swallowing and his fire-eating. He listened appreciatively to the art of a “spieler” praising a “performance inside;” and he turned to smile on a “booster” who put a shoulder behind him and gently impelled him towards the ticket office. He sniffed theodor of steaming frankfurters and fried crabs. He stood grinning before a merry-go-round that ground out a deafening cacophany from a German organ. And Doherty, beside him, had to stand and listen, grin and comment, with a hypocritical pretence of delight—working his toes secretly in his broken shoes, meanwhile, to ease the itch of his impatience to get on.
They got on, at last, to a saloon which Doherty had been heading for. It was a pine “front” with a sign that pictured a beer glass as big as a pail, marked “My Size! Five Cents!” They went past the bar to the deserted little drinking room beyond it, and sat down at a table beside a door which “Shine” did not notice—and Doherty did. The walls were covered with colored tissue papers, cut and folded in fans and circles,and with printed invitations to the public not to forget the “receptions” of some half-dozen “associations.” These were a “Welcome Home” to “Shine”; and he read them almost sentimentally while Doherty was gone to speak to the “barkeep” who was a “frien’” of his.
When he came back with two glasses of beer, “Shine” received his glass with a “Here’s lookin’ at yuh” that was warm. He drank a deep libation, open-throated, without tasting. He put the glass down and smiled. “Bum booze,” he said, clucking over a bitterness that burned his tongue.
Doherty kept his snub nose in his “schooner.”
“Shine” looked up at an “invitation” above him, and drank again to quench a sudden heat in his mouth.
“Say,” he said thickly, “I don’t like this beer.”
“Mine’s all right,” Doherty assured him. “I’ll get y’ another.”
Before he returned, “Shine” had drained the first glass. He took the second unsteadily, grinning at Doherty to cover the fact that he could not think of what he had intended to say. He drank thirstily, put down his glass and blinked. He had become conscious of a great lapse of time. It seemed to him that he had been silent for an hour.
He began to talk very busily, but without any great success in saying anything; and to lubricate his difficulty in articulation he drank and drank. “How’s that?” Doherty asked him, with each successive glass, and “Shine” assured him—as well as he could—that it was “A’ right a’ right.”
“How’sthat?” Doherty asked at last, exultingly; and his voice came to “Shine” as a thin rustle of hoarse sound. The wall seemed to be bellying like a curtain in a draught. “I’m fu’,” he said, and laughed tipsily.
The room had begun to swim around him, and he drank again, to steady it. It revolved faster and faster. He shut his eyes and tried to sit tight, but could not keep his balance. The motion dizzied him. He rested his head on the table, feeling very tired and very sleepy; and he decided that he would remain there until the world around him returned to a state of rest.
When he woke again, in a semi-stupor—it seemed only a few minutes later—he felt someone kicking the soles of his bare feet. He was lying on the floor of a room, stripped to his undershirt andtrousers. He could not see Doherty anywhere. A stranger was saying, “Look-a-here, ‘Shine.’ That partner o’ yours, Doherty, was in to see me this mornin’. He said yuh wanted a job ballyhooin’. He said yuh’d do me a barefoot dance fer the price of a pair o’ boots. Is that right?”
He grinned a grin of malice that showed the gold in all his huge teeth; and “Shine” recognized “Goldy” Simpson.