Chapter 20

"You can't! You can't! I 'ain't got the strength! I 'ain't got a thing in life that ain't wrapped around you. I can't go back to hit or miss like--like I could ten years ago. I 'ain't got nothing saved out of it all but you. Don't try to ditch me, Max! Don't! I--I'll walk on my knees for you. I--"

"For God's sake, Mae, I--"

"If there's a way to raise two times fifteen thou for you, Max, I--I'll raise it. I'll find a way, Max. I tell you I will! I'm lucky at the wheel, Max. You watch and see. You just watch and see. I can work. Max, I--"

"Get up, Mae, get up. There's a good girl. Get up and--"

"I'll work my fingers down, Max, only don't try to ditch me, don't try to ditch me! I'll go out to the country where your old woman can't ever sniff me. I--I'll fix it, Max, so you--so you just can't lose. Don't ditch me, dear; take your Maizie back. Take me in your arms and call me Maizie. Take me!"

"Girl, 'ain't you--'ain't you got no shame!"

"Just try me back for a month, Max. For a month, Max, and see if--if I don't fix things so they come out right. Gimme a month, Max! Gimme, Max! Gimme! Gimme!"

And with her last remnant of restraint gone, she lay downright at his feet, abandoned to virulent grief, and in her naked agony a shapeless mass of frill and flounce, a horrible and not dramatic spectacle of abandonment; decencies gone down before desire, the heart ruptured and broken through its walls. In such a moment of soul dishabille and her own dishabille of bosom bulging above the tight lacing of her corset-line as she lay prone, her mouth sagging and wet with tears, her lips blowing outward in bubbles, a picture, in fact, to gloss over, Mae Munroe dragged herself closer, flinging her arms about the knees of Mr. Zincas, sobbing through her raw throat.

"Just a month, Max! Don't ditch me! Don't! Don't! Don't!"

He looked away from the sorry spectacle of her bubbling lips and great, swollen eyelids.

"Leggo! Leggo my knees!"

"Just a month, Max, just--"

"Leggo! Leggo my knees! Leggo, girl! Ain't you ashamed!"

"Just a month, Max, I--"

"Gad! 'ain't you got no shame, girl! Get up! Leggo! I can't stand this, I tell you. Be a sport and leggo me quiet, Mae. I--I'll send you everything, a--a check that'll surprise you, old girl! Lemme go quiet! Nothing can't change things. Quit your blubbering. It makes me sick, I tell you. Quit your blubbering, old girl, and leggo. Leggo! Leg-go! Leg-go, I say!"

Suddenly he stooped and with a backward turn of her wrist unloosed himself and, while the pain still staggered her, side-stepped the huddle of her body, grasped his hat from the divan and lunged to the door, tugging for a frantic moment with the lock.

On her knees beside the piano, in quite the attitude he had flung her, leaning forward on one palm and amid the lacy whirl of her train, Mae Munroe listened to his retreating steps; heard the slam of a lower door.

You who recede before the sight of raw emotions with every delicacy shamed, do not turn from the spectacle of Mae Munroe prone there on the floor, her bosom upheaved and her mouth too loose. When the heart is torn the heart bleeds, whether under cover of culture and a boiled shirt-front or without shame and the wound laid bare. And Mae Munroe, who lay there, simple soul, only knew or cared that her heart lay quivering like a hurt thing, and for the sobs that bubbled too frankly to her lips had no concern.

But after a while they ceased of exhaustion, and she rose to her feet, her train threatening to throw her; walked toward the cold, cloyed dinner, half-eaten and unappetizing on the table; and fell to scooping some of the cold gravy up from its dish, letting it dripple from the spoon back again. The powder had long since washed off her cheeks and her face was cold as dough. The tears had dried around her mouth.

Presently she pinned up the lacy train about her, opened a cupboard door and slid into a dark, full-length coat, pinned on a hat with a feather that dropped over one side as if limp with wet, dabbed at her face with a pink powder-chamois and, wheezing ever so slightly, went out, tweaking off two of the three electric lights after her--down two flights of stairs through a quiet foyer and out into the fluid warmth of late October. Stars were out, myriads of them.

An hour she walked--down the cross-town street and a bit along the wide, bright, lighted driveway, its traffic long since died down to an occasional night-prowling cab, a skimming motor-car; then down a flight of curving stone steps with her slightly perceptible limp, and into the ledge of parkway where shadows took her into their velvet silence; down a second flight, across a railroad track, and to the water's edge, where a great coal-station ran a jut of pier out into the river. She could walk its length, feeling it sway to the heavy tug of current.

Out at the very edge the water washed up against the piles with a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be understood from the under side.

THE NAME AND THE GAME

At Christmas-tide men and women with soiled lives breathe alcoholic sighs and dare to glance back into the dim corridors of their long agos.

Cronies, snug in an age of steam heat, turn their warm backs upon to-day, swap white-Christmas stories, and hanker with forefinger laid alongside of nose for the base-burners and cold backs of the good old days.

Not least upon the busy magnate's table is his shopping-list.

Evenings, six-dollar-a-week salesgirls sit in their five-dollar-a-week hall-bedrooms, with their aching feet in a tub of hot water and their aching fingers busy with baby-ribboned coat-hangers and silk needle-book tokens of Yuletide affection.

Even as it flowered in a manger the Christmas spirit, a perennial lily upon the sooty face of the world, blooms out of the slack heap of men's rife and strife.

In the hearts of children it is a pod filled with their first happiness.

Down from a sky the color of cold dish-water a cloak of swift snow fell upon the city, muffling its voice like a hand held against its mouth. Children who had never before beheld a white Christmas leaped with the joy of it. A sudden army of men with blue faces and no overcoats sprang full-grown and armed with shovels, from out the storm. City parks lay etched in sudden finery. Men coming up out of the cañon of Wall Street remembered that it was Christmas and felt for bauble money.

At early dusk and through the white dance of the white storm the city slid its four million packs off its four million backs and turned homeward. Pedestrians with the shopper's light in their eyes bent into the flurry and darted for surface cars and subways. Commuters, laden with bundles and with tickets between their teeth, rushed for early trains.

Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the crowd, fighting for trains and place. Boys in cadet uniforms and boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining faces as if into the to-morrow. A tight tangle of business men passed single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level. A messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger's swift legs and darted in and around the knees of the crowd. A prodigal hesitated, then bought a second-class ticket for home. Two nuns hurried softly on missions of Christmas.

The low thunder of a thousand feet: tired feet, eager feet; flat feet; shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet. Voices that rose like wind to a gale. A child dragged by the arm and whimpering. A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon.

Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of tracks and stations.

At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down their pennies as they ran. In the glow of a spray of red and white electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant's pretty-girl periodical covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting with it.

"Whoops, la-la!"

"Good catch, kiddo."

"Oh, you Charley-boy, who was you pitching for last season?"

"The Reds, because that's your color."

"Say, if you're going to catch that four-eighteen you've got to break somebody's speed limit between here and track ten. Run along, Charley-boy, and Merry Christmas."

But Mr. Charles Scully swung to a halt, poured his armful of packages into a wire basket of six-city-postcard-views for ten cents, swung open his overcoat with a sprinkling of snow on its slick-napped velvet collar, lifted his small black mustache in a smile.

"Black-eyes, I'd miss three trains for you."

"There's not another until the four-forty."

"I should worry. Anyway, for all I know you've changed your mind and are coming out with me to-night, little one."

The quick blood ran up into her small face, dyeing it, and she withdrew from his nearing features.

"I have not! Gee! you're about as square as a doughnut, you are."

"Jumping Juniper, can't a fellow miss his train just to wish a little beauty like you a Merry Christmas? But on the level, I want to take you out home with me to-night; honest I do, little spitfire."

"Crank up there, Charley-boy; you got about thirty seconds to make that train in."

"Gets you sore every time I ask you out, don't it, black-eyes? Talk about your little tin saints!"

"Say, if you was any slicker you'd slide."

"You can't scare me with those black eyes."

"Can't I, my brave boy! Say, you'd want to quarantine the dictionary if you found smallpox in it, that's how hard you are to scare."

"Well, of all the lines of talk, if you 'ain't got the greatest. Cute is no name for you."

"And say, the place where you clerk must be a classy clothes-parlor, Charley-boy."

"Right-o, little one. If you ever pass by the Brown Haberdashery, on Twenty-third Street, drop in, and I'll buy you a lunch."

"Tra-la! Where did you get that checked suit? And I'll bet you flag the train out at Glendale, where you live, with that tie. Oh, you Checkers!"

"Some class to me, eh, kiddo?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that."

He leaned closer. His smile had an uplift like a crescent and a slight depression in his left cheek, too low for a dimple, twinkled when he smiled, like an adjacent star.

"Take it from me, Queenie, these glad rags are my stock in trade. In my line I got to sport them. At home I'm all to the overalls. If my boss was to see the old red wool smoking-jacket I wear around the house, he'd fire me for burlesquing the business."

"Well, of all the nerve! Let go my hand."

"Didn't know I had it, little one."

"And say, you give back that kodak picture you swiped off me yesterday. I don't give my photographs out promiscuous."

"That little snap-shot of you? Nix, I will! I took that home and hung it in a mother-of-pearl frame right over the parlor table."

"Sure! And above the family Bible, huh? I had a fellow once tell me he was a bookmaker, and I was green enough then to beg him to take me out and let me see him make 'em. But I've learnt a thing or two about you and your kind since then, Charley-boy."

"You come out to-night and I'll show it to you myself."

"Haven't you got my number, yet, Cholly--haven't you?"

"What is it, little one, number scared-cat?"

She flung him a glance over the hump of one shoulder. Nineteen summers had breezed lightly over her, and her lips were cherry-like, but tilted slightly as if their fruit had been plucked from the tree of sophistication.

"You bet your life I'm scared."

"Why, out there in Glendale, little one, you won't meet your own shadow, if that's what's hurting you."

"You bet your life I won't."

"My old woman will fix you up all right."

"Oh no, she won't!"

"Aw, come on, kiddo. We're going to have a tree for the little brother, and the old woman will be rigged up like a mast in her spotted silk. Come on. Who'll be any the wiser?"

Laughter and mockery rose to the surface of her eyes, bubbled to her lips.

"Huh! What's that only-son stuff you gave me yesterday? All about how you had to land a job in the city and make good after your old man died, eh? How about your yesterday's line of talk?"

"I--"

"All about how mother's wandering boy found himself all plastered over with the mortgage and worked nights to get out from under. All about--Aw, say, what's the use? But I always say to you fellows, 'Boys, cultivate good memories; you need 'em.' Little brother! Ha, joke!"

"I--aw--I--Little brother's what we call my sister Till's little red-headed kid. Aw, what--what you want to put me in bad for, sister? I'm not so easy to trip up as you think I am."

"Little brother! And say, that's a bottle of malted milk there in your pocket that you're taking out to him, ain't it? Sure it is."

"This? Aw, this--Say, you haven't got those snappy black eyes of yours for nothing, have you? This bottle here in my pocket, aw, this--this is a--bottle of brandy for my old woman. First snow flurry and her left foot begins to drag like a rag with rheumatism."

Her laughter rose, and his confusion with it.

"Sure," she cried.

"Aw--aw, come on, Marjie."

"Well, of all the nerve! My name's private property, it is."

"It slipped. It said itself. But, gee! I like it. Marjie! Some little name."

"Well, of all the nerve!"

"Come on, black-eyes. You're off at five and we'll catch the five-eighteen. Who's going to be any the wiser? I got something out there I want to tell you."

"My hearing's all right in the city."

"It's something I want to whisper right where I can get next to that little ear of yours."

"You got a swell chance at that little ear of mine, nix."

"Stingy!"

"You bet your life I'm stingy."

"It's a white Christmas for sure out where I live. Come on out and let me show you a good time, little one."

"I wish you was half as white as this Christmas is. Honest, sometimes I says to myself, I says, ain't there just none of you white? Has a girl like me got to keep dodging all her life?"

"Come, sister, let's catch the five-eighteen."

"You better run along before you get me all rubbed the wrong way. At five-eighteen I'll be buying my own meal ticket, let me tell you that."

"Then buy your own meal ticket, if that's what's hurting you, little touchy, and come out on the eight-eighteen. It's only a thirty-minute run; and if you say the word I'll be at the station with bells on to meet you. Come on. I'll show you the Christmas Eve of your life. Be a sport, Marjie."

"Yes, I always say, inviting a girl to be a sport is a slick way of inviting her to Hades. I've seen where being a sport lands a girl, I have. I ain't game, maybe, but, thank God, I ain't. Thank God, I ain't, is what I always say to them."

"Well, of all the funny little propositions."

"Well, there's nothing funny about your proposition."

"You're one funny little girl, but, gee! I like you."

There was that in his glance and the white flash of his teeth and the pomaded air of geniality about him that sent a quick network of thrills darting through her; all her perceptions rose, and her color.

"Come on, little girl."

"Oh," she cried, clenching her small tan hand, and a tempest of fury flashing across her face, "you--you fresh fellows up-town here think just because you wear good clothes and can hold down a decent job, that you--you can put up any kind of a proposition to a girl like me. Oh--oh, just every one of you!"

"Well, of all the little spitfires."

"What do you think I am? What does every one of you, up and down town, think I am? Do I look like I was born yesterday? Well, I wasn't, or the day before or the day before that. Honest to God, if I was a nice-appearing fellow like you I'd be ashamed, I would. I'd go out in the garden and eat worms, I would."

He retreated before her scorn, but smiling. "I'll get you yet, you little vix," he said; "you pretty little black-eyed vix, you; I'll get you yet.'

"Like hell you will."

"If you change your mind, come out on the eight-eighteen, girlie. Two blocks to the left of the station; the corner house with a little weather-cock over the porch. Can't miss it. I'll be drapin' the tree in tin fringe and wishing you were there."

"Oh," she cried, her voice cracked spang across with a sob, "I--I just hate you!"

"No, you don't," he said, smiling and gathering his parcels.

"Do."

"Don't."

"Do."

"What's that on your wrist?"

"Where?"

"There. I thought you said you threw it away."

Her right hand flew to her left wrist as if a welt lay there. "This, I--huh--I--I forgot I had it on. This--this little old bracelet you said you found in the Subway. It--it's nothing but red celluloid, anyway. I--I nearly did throw it away."

"You look just like a little gipsy, you do, with that red comb in that black hair of yours and that red bracelet on your little brown arm. I'll swear if I didn't miss my train by ten minutes the first time I seen you standing here at this counter with those big black eyes of yours shining out."

"You'll miss it again if you don't run away, Charley-boy."

"Dare you to come along! I'll wait for the five-eighteen."

"Don't hold your breath till I do."

"Dare you to come out on the eight-eighteen! Say the word, and I'll be at the station."

"I'll see myself crazy with the blues first."

"You might as well come, kiddo, because I'll get you yet."

"Try the soft-pedal stuff about the kid and the Christmas tree on the girl at the Glendale station. Maybe she hasn't cut her eye-teeth."

A flush swept his face like quick wind. "You're a bum sport, all righty."

"And you! Gee! if I was to tell you what I think you are! If I was!" She sank her teeth into her lower lip to keep it from trembling, but smiled. "But I wouldn't take the trouble, Charley-boy--honest, I wouldn't take the trouble."

"I'll get you yet, you little vix," he insisted, his white smile flashing, and retreating into the crowd.

"You--oh--oh, you!"

She stood looking after him, head backward and hip arched forward in the pose of Carmen's immortal defiance. But behind her flashing attitude her heart rose to her throat and a warm gush of blood to her face, betraying it.

When the illuminated hands of the illuminated tower clock swung to the wide angle of five o'clock, Miss Marjorie Clark and Miss Minnie Bundt, from the fancy-fruit stand opposite, cast off the brown cocoon of their workaday for the trim street finery which the American shopgirl, to the stupefaction of economists and theorists, can somehow evolve out of eight dollars a week.

In the locker-room they met, the placid sky-colored eyes of Miss Bundt meeting Miss Clark's in the wavy square of mirror.

"Snowing, ain't it?"

"Yep."

"Gee! that's a nifty little hat, Min! Where'd you get the pompon?"

"Five-and-Ten."

"If it 'ain't got the Avenue written all over it."

Silence.

"Want some my powder, Min? Pink."

"Nope."

"Want to--want to go to a movie to-night or--or bum around the stores? It's Christmas Eve."

"Can't."

"Date?"

"Yep."

Silence.

A flush rose to Miss Clark's face, darkening it. She adjusted her dyed-fur tippet and a small imitation-fur cap at just the angle which doubled its face value. Something seemed to leap out from her eyes and then retreat behind a smile and a squint.

"Say, Min, if my voice hurt me like yours does, I'd rub salve on it," and went out, slamming the door behind her. But a tear lay on the edge of her down-curved lashes, threatening to ricochet down her smoothly powdered cheek. She winked it in again. The station swarm was close to her, jostling, kicking her ankles in passing, buffeting.

From out the swift tide a figure without an overcoat, and a cap vizor pulled well down over his eyes, locked her arm from the rear, so that she sprang about, releasing herself.

"For God's sake, Blink, cut the pussy-foot tread, will you? I've jabbed with a hat-pin for less than that."

"Merry Christmas, Marj."

"Yes, I'm merry as a crutch. What brought you around, Blink?"

"Can't a fellow drop around to pick you up?"

"Land that job?"

"Not a chance. What they want down there is a rough-neck, not a gentleman rubber-down. Say, take it from me; after a fellow has worked in the high-class Turkish baths, Third Avenue joints ain't up to his tone no more. I got to have class, kiddo. That's why I got such a lean toward you."

"Cut that."

"Come down to-night, Marj?"

"Where?"

"Harry's."

"Well, I guess not."

"Buy you a dinner."

"But you're flat as your hand."

He set up a jingling in his left pocket. "I am, am I?"

"Well, I'm not going."

"When you going to cut this comedy, Marj?"

"I'm not. I'm just beginning."

"Breaking into high society, eh? Fine chance."

"Yes, with the gang of you down there hanging on like the plague, I got a swell chance, nix."

"It's because we know you too well, Marj. Knew you when you had two black pigtails and used to carry a bucket into the family entrance of Harry's place, crying with madness every time your old man sent you. Gad! I can see you yet, sweetness, with your big black eyes blacker than ever, and steering home your old man from off a jamboree."

"God! sometimes I wake up in the night just like him and ma was still alive and me and her was sitting there listening to him creak up the stairs on his bad nights. I wake up, I can tell you, in a sweat--right in a sweat."

"I knew you in them days, kiddo, just like you knew me. That's why you can't pull nothing over on a fellow, kiddo, that's had as many pulls on your all-day suckers as I have. You're a little quitter, you are, and sometimes I think you're out for bigger game."

"It don't mean because a girl was born in the mud she's got to stick there, does it?"

"No, but she can't pretend she don't know one of the old mud-turtles when she sees one."

"Mud-turtle is the right name."

"The crowd has got your number, all right, kiddo; they know you're out after bigger game. You're a little turncoat, that's what they say about you."

"Turncoat! Who wouldn't turn a coat they was ashamed of? I guess you all don't remember how I used to say, even back in those years when I was taking tickets down at Lute's old Fourteenth Street Amusement Parlors, how when my little minute came I was going to breeze away from the gang down there?"

"I remember, all righty."

"How I was going to get me a job up-town here, where I could get in with a decent crowd of girls, and not be known for the kind down there that you and all of 'em knew I--I wasn't."

"Sure we knew."

"Yes, but what good does that do me? Can a dirty little yellow-haired snip over in the Fancy Fruits give me the once-over and a turn-down? She can. And why? Because I ain't certified. I come from a counterfeit crowd, and who's going to take the trouble to find my number and see if it's real?"

"Aw, now--"

"Didn't a broken-down old granny over in the Thirty-fourth Street house where I roomed give me notice last week, because Addie Lynch found me out one night and came to see me, lit up like a Christmas tree?"

"That's why I say, Marj, stick to the old ones who know you."

"Like May Pope used to say, a girl might as well have the game as the name."

"If I was a free man, Marj, I'd--"

"Where has the strait and narrow got me to, I'd like to know? Sometimes I think it's nothing but a blind alley pushing me back."

"If I was a free man, Marj--"

"Let me meet a slick little up-stage fellow that doesn't have to look two ways before he walks the wrong beat in daylight; let me meet a fellow like that, and where does it get me?"

"I'm no saint, Marj, but there ain't a beat in town I'd have to look two ways on. Ask any cop--"