Chapter 8

A gloomy day and the loop streets grimace behind a mist. The electric signs are lighted. The buildings open like great fans in the half dark.

The streets invite a mood of melodrama. Windows glint evilly. Doorways grin with rows of electric teeth. This, _Jonnerrvetter_! is the Great City of the old-time ten-twenty-thirty thrillers. The devourer of innocence, the strumpet of stone.

I walk along humming a bar of villainous music, the "skeeter scale" that the orchestra used to turn turn turn taaaa-tum in the old Alhambra as the two dockwallopers and the leering Chinaman were climbing in through little Mabel's hall bedroom window to abduct her.

Those were happy days for the drama, when a scoundrel was a scoundrel and wore a silk hat to prove it, and a hero was a two-fisted man, as anybody could tell by a glance at his marcelled hair and his open-at-the-throat shirt.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum. Pizzicato pianissimo, says the direction on the score. So we are all set for a melodrama. Here is the Great City back-drop. Here are the grim-faced crowds shuffling by under the jaundice glare of electric signs. And Christmas is coming. A vague gray snow trickles out of the gloom.

A proper time for melodrama. All we need is a plot. Come, come now--a plot alive with villains and weeping maidens. Halto! The window of the 5--and 10-cent store! a tumble of gewgaws and candies and kitchen utensils. Christmas tree tinsel and salted peanuts, jazz music and mittens.

The curtain is up. Egad, what a masterly scene. A kitchen Coney Island. A puzzle picture of isles, signs, smells, noises. Cinderella wandering wistfully in the glass-bead section looking for a fairy godmother.

A clinking obbligato by the cash registers. The poor are buying gifts. This garish froth of merchandise is the back ground of their luxuries. This noisy puzzle-picture store is their horn of plenty. A sad thought and we'll dismiss it. What we want is plot.

Perhaps the jazz-song booster singing out of the side of his mouth with tired eyes leering at the crowd of girls: "Won't You Let Me Love You If I Promise to Be Good?" And "Love Me, Turtle Dove." And "Lovin' Looie." And "The Lovin' Blues."

All lovin'. Jazz songs, ballads, sad, silly, boobish nut songs--all about love me--love me. All about stars and kisses, moonlight and "she took my man away." There are telephones all over the walls and the song booster's voice pops out over the salted-peanut section, over the safety-pin and brassware section. A tinny, nasal voice with a whine and a hoarseness almost hiding the words.

The cash registers clink, clink. "Are you waited on, madam? Five cents a package, madam." The crowds, tired eyed, shabbily dressed, bundle-laden, young, old--the crowds shuffle up and down, staring at gewgaws, and the love-me love songs follow them around. Follow them to the loose-bead counter where Madge with her Japanese puffs of hair, her wad of gum and her black shirtwaist that she keeps straightening out continually by drawing up her bosom and pressing down on her hips with her hands--where Madge holds forth.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum--halto! Here is our plot. Outside the pizzicato of the crowds, the Great City, shining, dragon-eyed, through the mist--the City That Has No Heart. And here under our nose, twinkling up at our eyes, a huge tray full of 10-cent wedding rings. End of Act One.

Act Two, now--Madge, the sharp-tongued, weary-eyed young woman behind the counter. Love-me love songs in her ear and people unraveling, faces unraveling before her. Who buys these wedding rings, Madge? And did you ever notice anything odd about your customers? And why do you suppose they buy ten-cent wedding rings, Madge?

"Just a moment," says Madge. "What is it, miss? A ring? What kind? Oh, yes. Ten cents. Gold or platinum just the same. Yes."

Two giggling girls move off. And Madge, chewing gently on her wad of gum and smoothing her huge hair puffs out with the coyly stiffened palms of her hands, talks.

"Sure, I get you. About the wedding rings. Sure, that's easy. We sell about twenty or thirty of them every day. Oh, mostly to kids--girls and boys. Sometimes an old Johnny comes in with a moth-eaten fur collar and blows a dime for a wedding ring. But mostly girls.

"I sometimes take a second look at them. They usually giggle when they ask for the ring. And they usually pretend it's for somebody as a joke they're buying it. Or sometimes they walk around the counter for a half hour and get me nervous as a cat. 'Cause I know what they want and they can't get their gall up to come and ask for it. But finally they make the break and come up and pick out a ring without saying a word and hand over ten cents.

"There was one girl no more than sixteen just this morning. She come here all full of pep and kidded about things and said wasn't them platinum wedding rings just too grand for words, and so on. Then she said she wanted a half-dozen of them, and was there a discount when bought in such quantity? I started wrapping them up when I looked at her and she was crying. And she dropped her sixty cents on the counter and said: 'Never mind, never mind. I don't want them. I can't wear them. They'll only make it worse.'"

A middle-aged-looking man interrupts. "What is it, sir?" asks Madge. "Anything in rings? What kind?" "Oh, just plain rings," says the man with a great show of indifference, while his eyes ferret among the trinkets on the counter. And then, very calmly: "Oh, these will do, I guess." Two wedding rings, and he spent twenty cents. Madge follows him with her eyes. "That's it," she whispers, "usually the men buy two. One for themselves and one for the girl. Or if it's the girl that's buying them it's one for herself and one for her girl chum who's going with her and the two fellas on the party. Say, take it from me, these rings don't ever hear no wedding marches."

* * * * *

Back into the gloomy street again. A plot in our head, but who's the villain and who's the heroine and the hero? An easy answer to that. The crowd here--sad faced, tired-walking, bundle-laden. The crowd continually dissolving amid street cars and autos is the villain.

A crowd of shoppers buying slippers for uncle and shawls for mother and mufflers for brother and some bars of soap for the bathroom. Buying everything and anything that fill the fan-shaped buildings with their glinting windows. Buying carpet sweepers and window curtains and linoleum.

Pizzicato, pianissimo, professor--little-girl gigglers and hard-faced dock wallopers and slick-haired lounge lizards and broken-hearted ones--twenty a day they sidle up to Madge's counter, where the love me, love me songs razz the heavy air, and shoot a dime for a wedding ring.

WHERE THE "BLUES" SOUND

"That St. Louis woman Wid her diahmond rings, Pulls mah man 'round By her apron strings--"

A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams, college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a terrifying soprano--

"If it waren't foh her powdah And her stohe bought hair. The man Ah love Would not have gone nowhere--"

Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.

Listen and watch and through the tumult, rising like a strange incense from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil himself--the echo of some mystic cymbal note.

Later the music will let out a tinny blaze of sound. Men and women will press together and a pack of bodies will sway on the dance floor. The tungstens will go out and the spotlight will throw colors--green, purple, lavender, blue, violet--and as the scene grows darker and the colors revolve a howl will fill the place. But on the dance floor a silence will fasten itself over the swaying bodies and there will be only the sound of feet pushing. The silence of a ritual--faces stiffened, eyes rolling--a rigid embrace of men and women creeping cunningly among the revolving colors and the whiplike rhythms of the jazz band.

* * * * *

"Lost souls," says the vice reports, and the vice reports speak with a calm and knowing voice. Women whose bodies and faces are like shells of evil; vicious seeming men with a rasp in their laughter. These are among those present. Aphrodite is a blousy wench in the 35th and State streets neighborhood. And her votaries, although they offer an impressive ensemble, are a sorry lot taken face by face.

Izzy, who is an old timer, sits at a table and takes it in. Izzy's eyes and ears have learned to pick details in a bedlam. He can talk softly and listen easily through the height of the cabaret racket. The scene hits Izzy as water hits a duck's back.

"Well," he says, "it's a good night tonight. The slummers are out in full force rubberin' at each other. Well, this is a funny world, take it from me. Me? Huh, I come here every night or so to have a little drink and look 'em over for a while. Ain't nothing to see but a lot o' molls and a lot of sucker guys. Them? Say, they never learn no better. Tough guys ain't no different from soft guys, see? They all fall for the dames just as hard and just as worse. There's many a good guy in this place that's been gave a tumble by them, see?

"There, I got an idee he'd blow in tonight. He ain't missed a Saturday night for months. And he usu'lly makes it four or five times a week. That guy over there wit' the mop o' gray hair. Yeah, that's him. Well, he's the professor. I spotted him in the district a year or so ago. He had a dame wit' him who I know, see? A terrible broad. Say, maybe you've heard of him. His name is Weintraub. I picked it up from the dame he's goin' wit', see? He ought to be in your line. He was a reg'lar music professor before he come down. The leader of a swell orchestra somewhere in the east or in Europe, I guess. The dame don't know for sure, but she told me he was some baby on music.

"Well, that's him there, see? He comes in like this and sits down near the band. Look at him. Do you make him? The way he's movin' his hands? See, he's leadin' the band. Sure"--Izzy laughed mirthlessly--"that's what the guy's doin'. Nuts, see? Daffy. He comes in here like that and I always watch him. He sits still and when the music starts up he begins wit' his hands. Ain't he the berries?

"Now keep your eye on him. You'll see somethin' pretty quick. He's alone tonight. I guess the dame has shook him for the evenin'. Look, he's still conductin'. Ain't he rich? But he's got a good face, you might say. Class, eh? You'd know he was a musician.

"I tell you I begin to watch him the first time I saw him. And from the beginnin' he's always conductin' when the band starts in. The dame is usu'lly wit' him and she don't like it. She tries to stop him, but he don't see her for sour apples. He keeps right on like now, beatin' time wit' his hands. Look, the poor nut's growin' excited. Daffy. Can you beat it? There he goes. See? That's on account of Jerry. Jerry's the black one on the end wit' the saxophone. Ha, Jerry always does it.

"I told Jerry about this guy and Jerry tried it on him the first night. He pulled a sour one, you know, blew a mean one through the horn and his nobs nearly fell out of his seat. Like now. See, he's through. He won't conduct the band any more tonight. He's sore. No sir, he won't conduct such a lot of no-good boilermakers like Jerry. Can you beat it?"

* * * * *

Izzy's eyes follow a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man from one of the tables. A thin-faced man with bloodshot eyes. He walks as if he were half asleep. The crowd swallows him and Izzy laughs again without mirth.

"He's done for the night. That's low down of Jerry. But Jerry says it gets his goat to see this daffy guy comin' in here night after night and leadin' the band from the table. So the smoke blows that sour note every time his nobs gets started on his conductin' and it always knocks his nobs for a gool. He never stays another minute, but lights out right away.

"Look, there's his dame. The one wit' the green hat, sittin' wit' the guy with the cheaters over there. Yeah, that's her. I don't know why she ain't wit' him tonight. Prob'ly a lovers' quarrel." And Izzy grinned. "She's a tough one, take it from me. I don't know how she hooked the professor, but she did. She used to be swelled up about him. And once she got him a job in Buxbaum's old place, she told me, to work in the orchestra. But his nobs kicked. Said he'd cut his throat before playin' in a roughneck orchestra and who did she think he was to do such a thing? He says to her: I'm Weintraub--Weintraub, d'ye understand?' And he hauls off and wallops her one and she guve up tryin' to get him a job. It makes her sore to watch him sittin' around like tonight and conductin' the orchestra. She says it ain't because he's daffy, but on account of his bein' stuck up."

The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked her out again--this time standing against a far wall talking to the professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no," with his hands.

And now the entertainer was singing again:

"Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be, Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea, Or else he would not have gone so far away from me."

VAGABONDIA

Here they come. Five merry travelers in a snorting, dust-caked automobile. Wanderers, egad! Bowling rakishly across the country. Dusters and goggles and sunburn. Prairie nights have sung to them. Little towns have grinned at them. Mountains, valleys, forests and stars have danced across their windshield.

The newspaper man stood watching them haul up to the Adams Street curb. His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows. Here was a chariot out of another world. Motor vagabonds. Scooting into a city with a swagger to their dust-caked wheels. And scooting out again.

The newspaper man thought, "The world isn't buried yet. There's still a restlessness left. Things change from triremes to motor boats, from Rosinante to automobiles. But adventure merely mounts a new seat and goes on. Dick Hovey sang it once:

"I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay."

The five merry travelers crawled out and stretched themselves. They doffed their goggles and slipped off their linen dusters and changed forthwith from a group of flying gnomes into five tired-looking citizens of California. Two middle aged women. Two middle-aged men and a son.

One of the men said, "Well, we'll lay up here for awhile, I got a blister on my hand from the wheel."

One of the women answered, "I must buy some hairpins, Martin."

The newspaper man said to himself, "What ho! I'll give them a ring. Why not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the one that goes:

"There's a schooner in the offing With her topsails shot with fire. And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire."

"You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company in San Francisco. Here's my card."

"Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card.

"And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for you?"

Newspaper men are perhaps the only creatures who as a type never learn how to ask questions. An embarrassment caused by the stupidity of the gabby great whom they interrogate daily puts a crimp into their tongues. Their questions wince in anticipation of the banalities they are doomed to elicit. Their curiosity collapses under the shadow of the inevitable, impending bromide.

Thus the newspaper man, wearily certain that regardless of what he asks or how he asks it, he will hear for answers only the clumsy asininities behind which the personalities, leaders and sacred white cows pompously attitudinize, gets so that he mumbles a bit incoherently.

But here was a different case. Here were merry travelers with memories of wind-swept valleys and star-capped mountains to chatter on. So the newspaper man unearthed his vocabulary, tilted his hat a trifle and smiled invitingly.

"Well," said he to the spokesman of the wanderers, "The kind of story I'd like to get would be a story about five people wandering across the country. You know. Hills, sunsets, trees and how those things drive away the monotony that fills up the hearts of city folk. What you enjoyed on the trip and the advantages of a rover over a swivel-chair statistician."

An eloquence was beginning to skip around on the newspaper man's tongue. His heart, weary of tall buildings and the endless grimace of city windows, began to warm under the visions his phrases aroused.

Then he paused. One of the women had interrupted. "Go on Martin, you can tell him all that. And don't forget about the lovely hotel breakfast room in Des Moines."

Martin, however, hesitated. He was a heavy-set, large-faced man with expansive features almost devoid of expression. Suddenly his face lighted up. His hands jumped together and he rubbed their palms enthusiastically.

"I see," he said with profundity. "I see."

"Yes," breathed the newspaper man.

"Well," said Mr. Stevers, "the first thing I'd like to tell you, young man, is about the car. You won't believe this, but we've been making twenty miles on a gallon, that is, averaging twenty miles on each and every gallon, sir, since we left San Francisco. Pretty good, eh?"

On a piece of scratch paper the newspaper man obediently wrote, "twenty miles, gallon."

"And then," went on the spokesman for the wanderers, "Our speed, eh? You'd like to know that? Well, without stretching the thing at all, and you can verify it from any of my party, we've averaged twenty-six miles an hour all the time out. I tell you the old boat had to travel some to do that."

'"Twenty-six miles," scribbled the newspaper man, adding after it, "The man's an idiot."

Mr. Stevers, unmindful, loosened up. The price of gasoline. The price of breakfasts. The condition of the roads. How long a stretch they had been able to do without a halt. How many hours a day he himself had stuck at the wheel. When he had finished the newspaper man bowed and walked abruptly away.

* * * * *

The newspaper man's thoughts form a conclusion.

"It's true, then," he thought, "the world's becoming as stupid as it looks. People are drying up inside with facts, figures, dollar signs. This man and his party would have got as much out of their cross-country trip if they'd all been blindfolded and shot through a tunnel two thousand feet under the ground. Man is like an audience and he has walked out on mystery and adventure. The show kind of tired him. And got his goat. It would have been a good yarn otherwise, the motor vagabonds. I'd have ended with Hovey's verse:

"I must forth again tomorrow, With the sunset I must be Hull down on the trail of rapture In the wonder of the sea."

Mumbling the lines to himself, the newspaper man strode on through the crowded loop with a sudden swagger in his eyes.

NIRVANA

The newspaper man felt a bit pensive. He sat in his bedroom frowning at his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man's thought from day to day with an irritating blur.

And for eight years or so the newspaper man had been fumbling around trying to get it down on paper. But no novel had grown out of the blur in his head.

* * * * *

The newspaper man put on his last year's straw hat and went into the street, taking his pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense.

At Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road the newspaper man paused. Here the loneliness he had felt in his bedroom seemed to grow more acute. Not only his own aimlessness, but the aimlessness of the staring, smiling crowd afflicted him.

Then out of the babble of faces he heard his name called. A rouged young flapper, high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes. The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur in the newspaper man's mind.

She was one of the things he fumbled for on the typewriter--one of the city products born of the tinpan bacchanal of the cabarets. A sort of frontispiece for an Irving Berlin ballad. The caricature of savagery that danced to the caricature of music from the jazz bands. The newspaper man smiled. Looking at her he understood her. But she would not fit into the typewritten phrases.

"Wilson Avenue," he thought, as he walked beside her chatter. "The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She's it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette."

* * * * *

Thus, the newspaper man thinking and the flapper flapping, they came together to a cabaret in the neighborhood. The orchestra filled the place with confetti of sound. Laughter, shouts, a leap of voices, blazing lights, perspiring waiters, faces and hats thrusting vivid stencils through the uncoiling tinsel of tobacco smoke.

On the dance floor bodies hugging, toddling, shimmying; faces fastened together; eyes glassy with incongruous ecstasies.

The newspaper man ordered two drinks of moonshine and let the scene blur before him like a colored picture puzzle out of focus. Above the music he heard the childishly strident voice of the flapper:

"Where you been hiding yourself? I thought you and I were cookies. Well, that's the way with you Johns. But there's enough to go around, you can bet. Say boy! I met the classiest John the other evening in front of the Hopper. Did he have class, boy! You know there are some of these fancy Johns who look like they were the class. But are they? Ask me. Nix. And don't I give them the berries, quick? Say, I don't let any John get moldy on me. Soon as I see they're heading for a dumb time I say 'razzberry.' And off your little sugar toddles."

"How old are you?" inquired the newspaper man abstractedly.