Chapter 10

Slightly by, the spoken word and the whistled innuendo followed her like a trail of bubbles in the wake of a flying-fish. A youth still wearing a fraternity pin pretended to lick his downy chops. The son of the president of the Mound City Oil Company emitted a long, amorous whistle. Willie Waxter--youngest scion, scalawag, and scorcher of one of the oldest families--jammed down his motorgoggles from the visor of his cap, making the feint of pursuing. Mr. Charley Cox, of half a hundred first-page exploits, did pursue, catching up slightly breathless.

"What's your hurry, honey?"

She spun about, too startled.

"Charley Cox! Well, of all the nerve! Why didn't you scare me to death and be done with it?"

"Did I scare you, sweetness? Cross my heart, I didn't mean to."

"Well, I should say you did!"

He linked his arm into hers.

"Come on; I'll buy you a drink."

She unlinked.

"Honest, can't a girl go home from work in this town without one of you fellows getting fresh with her?"

"All right, then; I'll buy you a supper. The car is back there, and we'll shoot out to the inn. What do you say? I feel like a house afire this evening, kiddo. What does your speedometer register?"

"Charley, aren't you tired painting this old town yet? Ain't there just nothing will bring you to your senses? Honest, this morning's papers are a disgrace. You--you won't catch me along again."

He slid his arm, all for ingratiating, back into hers.

"Come now, honey; you know you like me for my speed."

She would not smile.

"Honest, Charley, you're the limit."

"But you like me just the same. Now don't you, Loo?"

She looked at him sidewise.

"You've been drinking, Charley."

He felt of his face.

"Not a drop, Loo. I need a shave, that's all."

"Look at your stud--loose."

He jammed a diamond whip curling back upon itself into his maroon scarf. He was slightly heavy, so that his hands dimpled at the knuckle, and above the soft collar, joined beneath the scarf with a goldbar pin, his chin threatened but did not repeat itself.

"I got to go now, Charley; there's a North End car coming."

"Aw, now, sweetness, what's the idea? Didn't you walk down here to pick me up?"

An immediate flush stung her face.

"Well, of all the darn conceit! Can't a girl walk down to the loop to catch her car and stretch her legs after she's been cooped up all day, without a few of you boys throwing a bouquet or two at yourselves?"

"I got to hand it you, Loo; when you walk down this street, you make every girl in town look warmed over."

"Do you like it, Charley? It's that checked jacket I bought at Hamlin's sale last year made over."

"Say, it's classy! You look like all the money in the world, honey."

"Huh, two yards of coat-lining, forty-four cents, and Ida Bell's last year's office-hat reblocked, sixty-five."

"You're the show-piece of the town, all right. Come on; let's pick up a crowd and muss-up Claxton Road a little."

"I meant what I said, Charley. After the cuttings-up of last night and the night before I'm quits. Maybe Charley Cox can afford to get himself talked about because he's Charley Cox, but a girl like me with a job to hold down, and the way ma and Ida Bell were sitting up in their nightgowns, green around the gills, when I got home last night--nix! I'm getting myself talked about, if you want to know it, running with--your gang, Charley."

"I'd like to see anybody let out so much as a grunt about you in front of me. A fellow can't do any more, honey, to show a girl where she stands with him than ask her to marry him--now can he? If I'd have had my way last night, I'd--"

"You was drunk when you asked me, Charley."

"You mean you got cold feet?"

"Thank God, I did!"

"I don't blame you, girl. You might do worse--but not much."

"That's what you'd need for your finishing-touch, a girl like me dragging you down."

"You mean pulling me up."

"Yes, maybe, if you didn't have a cent."

"I'd have enough sense then to know better than to ask you, honey. You 'ain't got that fourteen-carat look in your eye for nothing. You're the kind that's going to bring in a big fish, and I wish it to you."

"Lots you know."

"Come on; let me ride you around the block, then."

"If--if you like my company so much, can't you just take a walk with me or come out and sit on our steps awhile?"

"Lord, girl, Flamm Avenue is hot enough to fry my soul to-night!"

"We can't all have fathers that live in thirty-room houses out in Kingsmoreland Place."

"Thank God for that! I sneaked home this morning to change my clothes, and thought maybe I'd got into somebody's mausoleum by mistake."

"Was--was your papa around, Charley?"

"In the library, shut up with old man Brookes."

"Did he--did he see the morning papers? You know what he said last time, Charley, when the motor-cycle cop chased you down an embankment."

"Honey, if my old man was to carry out every threat he utters, I'd be disinherited, murdered, hong-konged, shanghaied, and cremated every day in the year."

"I got to go now, Charley."

"Not let a fellow even spin you home?"

"You know I want to, Charley, but--but it don't do you any good, boy, being seen with me in that joy-wagon of yours. It--it don't do you any good, Charley, ever--ever being seen with me."

"There's nothing or nobody in this town can hurt my reputation, honey, and certainly not my ace-spot girl. Turn your mind over, and telephone down for me to come out and pick you up about eight."

"Don't hit it up to-night, Charley. Can't you go home one evening?"

He juggled her arm.

"You're a nice little girl, all righty."

"There's my car."

He elevated her by the elbow to the step, swinging up half-way after her to drop a coin into the box.

"Take care of this little lady there, conductor, and don't let your car skid."

"Oh, Charley--silly!"

She forced her way into the jammed rear platform, the sharp brim of the red sailor creating an area for her.

"S'long, Charley!"

"S'long, girl!"

Wedged there in the moist-faced crowd, she looked after him, at his broad back receding. An inclination to cry pressed at her eyeballs.

Flamm Avenue, which is treeless and built up for its entire length with two-story, flat-roofed buildings, stares, window for window, stoop for stoop, at its opposite side, and, in summer, the strip of asphalt street, unshaded and lying naked to the sun, gives off such an effluvium of heat and hot tar that the windows are closed to it and night descends like a gas-mask to the face.

Opening the door upon the Hassiebrock front room, convertible from bed- to sitting-room by the mere erect-position-stand of the folding-bed, a wave of this tarry heat came flowing out, gaseous, sickening. Miss Hassiebrock entered with her face wry, made a diagonal cut of the room, side-stepping a patent rocker and a table laid out with knickknacks on a lace mat, slammed closed two windows, and, turning inward, lifted off her hat, which left a brand across her forehead and had plastered down her hair in damp scallops.

"Whew!"

"Lo-o, that you?"

"Yes, ma."

"Come out to your supper. I'll warm up the kohlrabi."

Miss Hassiebrock strode through a pair of chromatic portières, with them swinging after her, and into an unlit kitchen, gray with dusk. A table drawn out center and within range of the gas-range was a blotch in the gloom, three figures surrounding it with arms that moved vaguely among a litter of dishes.

"I wish to Heaven somebody in this joint would remember to keep those front windows shut!"

Miss Ida Bell Hassiebrock, at the right of the table, turned her head so that, against the window, her profile, somewhat thin, cut into the gloom.

"There's a lot of things I wish around here," she said, without a ripple to her lips.

"Hello, ma!"

"I'll warm up the kohlrabi, Loo."

Mrs. Hassiebrock, in the green black of a cotton umbrella and as sparse of frame, moved around to the gas-range, scraping a match and dragging a pot over the blue flame.

"Never mind, ma; I ain't hungry."

At the left of the table Genevieve Hassiebrock, with thirteen's crab-like silhouette of elbow, rigid plaits, and nose still hitched to the star of her nativity, wound an exceedingly long arm about Miss Hassiebrock's trim waist-line.

"I got B in de-portment to-day, Loo. You owe me the wear of your spats Sunday."

Miss Hassiebrock squeezed the hand at her waist.

"All right, honey. Cut Loo a piece of bread."

"Gussie Flint's mother scalded her leg with the wash-boiler."

"Did she? Aw!"

Mrs. Hassiebrock came then, limping around, tilting the contents of the steaming pot to a plate.

"Sit down, ma; don't bother."

Miss Hassiebrock drew up, pinning a fringed napkin that stuck slightly in the unfolding across her shining expanse of shirtwaist. Broke a piece of bread. Dipped.

Silence.

"Paula Krausnick only got C in de-portment. When the monitor passed the basin, she dipped her sponge soppin'-wet."

"Anything new, ma?"

Mrs. Hassiebrock, now at the sink, swabbed a dish with gray water.

"My feet's killin' me," she said.

Miss Ida Bell, who wore her hair in a coronet wound twice round her small head, crossed her knife and fork on her plate, folded her napkin, and tied it with a bit of blue ribbon.

"I think it's a shame, ma, the way you keep thumping around in your stocking feet like this was backwoods."

"I can't get my feet in shoes--the joints--"

"You thump around as much as you darn please, ma. If Ida Bell don't like the looks of you, let her go home with some of her swell stenog friends. You let your feet hurt you any old way you want 'em to. I'm going to buy you some arnica. Pass the kohlrabi."

"Well, my swell 'stenog friends,' as you call them, keep themselves self-respecting girls without getting themselves talked about, and that's more than I can say of my sister. If ma had the right kind of gumption with you, she'd put a stop to it, all right."

Mrs. Hassiebrock leaned her tired head sidewise into the moist palm of her hand.

"She's beyond me and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht to God there was a father to rule youse!"

"I tell you, ma--mark my word for it--if old man Brookes ever finds out I'm sister to any of the crowd that runs with Charley Cox and Willie Waxter and those boys whose fathers he's lawyer for, it'll queer me for life in that office--that's what it will. A girl that's been made confidential stenographer after only one year in an office to have to be afraid, like I am, to pick up the morning's paper."

"Paula Krausnick's lunch was wrapped in the paper where Charley Cox got pinched for speedin'--speedin'--speedin'--"

"Shut up, Genevieve! Just don't you let my business interfere with yours, Ida Bell. Brookes don't know you're on earth outside of your dictation-book. Take it from me, I bet he wouldn't know you if he met you on the street."

"That's about all you know about it! If you found yourself confidential stenographer to the biggest lawyer in town, he'd know you, all right--by your loud dressing. A blind man could see you coming."

"Ma, are you going to stand there and let her talk to me thataway? I notice she's willing to borrow my loud shirtwaists and my loud gloves and my loud collars."

"If ma had more gumption with you, maybe things would be different."

Mrs. Hassiebrock limped to the door, dangling a pail.

"I 'ain't got no more strength against her. My ears won't hold no more. I'm taking this hot oil down to Mrs. Flint's scalds. She's, beyond my control, and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht to God there was a father! I wisht to God!"

Her voice trailed off and down a rear flight of stairs.

"Yes _sir_," resumed Miss Hassiebrock, her voice twanging in her effort at suppression, "I notice you're pretty willing to borrow some of my loud dressing when you get a bid once in a blue moon to take a boat-ride up to Alton with that sad-faced Roy Brownell. If Charley didn't have a cent to his name and a harelip, he'd make Roy Brownell look like thirty cents."

"If Roy Brownell was Charley Cox, I'd hate to leave him laying around loose where you could get your hands on him."

"Genevieve, you run out and play."

"If--if you keep running around till all hours of the night, with me and ma waiting up for you, kicking up rows and getting your name insinuated in the newspapers as 'the tall, handsome blonde,' I--I'm going to throw up my job, I am, and you can pay double your share for the running of this flat. Next thing we know, with that crowd that don't mean any good to you, this family is going to find itself with a girl in trouble on its hands."

"You--"

"And if you want to know it, and if I wasn't somebody's confidential stenographer, I could tell you that you're on the wrong scent. Boys like Charley Cox don't mean good by your kind of a girl. If you're not speedy, you look it, and that's almost the same as inviting those kind of boys to--"

Miss Lola Hassiebrock sprang up then, her hand coming down in a small crash to the table.

"You cut out that talk in front of that child!"

Thus drawn into the picture, Genevieve, at thirteen, crinkled her face for not uncalculating tears.

"In this house it's fuss and fuss and fuss. Other children can go to the 'movies' after supper, only me-e-e--"

"Here, honey; Loo's got a dime for you."

"Sending that child out along your own loose ways, instead of seeing to it she stays home to help ma do the dishes!"

"I'll do the dishes for ma."

"It's bad enough for one to have the name of being gay without starting that child running around nights with--"

"Ida Bell!"

"You dry up, Ida Bell! I'll do what I pl--ease with my di--uhm--di--uhm."

"If you say another word about such stuff in front of that child, I'll--"

"Well, if you don't want her to hear what she sees with her eyes all around her, come into the bedroom, then, and I can tell you something that'll bring you to your senses."

"What you can tell me I don't want to hear."

"You're afraid."

"I am, am I?"

"Yes."

With a wrench of her entire body, Miss Lola Hassiebrock was across the room at three capacity strides, swung open a door there, and stood, head flung up and pressing back tears, her lips turned inward.

"All right, then--tell--"

After them, the immediately locked door resisting, Genevieve fell to batting the panels.

"Let me in! Let me in! You're fussin' about your beaux. Ray Brownell has a long face, and Charley Cox has a red face--red face--red face! Let me in! In!"

After a while the ten-cent piece rolled from her clenched and knocking fist, scuttling and settling beneath the sink. She rescued it and went out, lickety-clapping down the flight of rear stairs.

Silence descended over that kitchen, and a sooty dusk that almost obliterated the table, drawn out and cluttered after the manner of those who dine frowsily; the cold stove, its pots cloying, and a sink piled high with a task whose only ending is from meal to meal.

Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped silhouette of Miss Hassiebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room. Her voice came tight, as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting into hysteria.

"Give me Olive, two-one-o." The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo. "Stag?... Say, get me Charley Cox. He's out in front or down in the grill or somewhere around. Page him quick! Important!" She grasped the nozzle of the instrument as she waited, breathing into it with her head thrown back. "Hello--Charley? That you? It's me. Loo ... _Loo_! Are you deaf, honey? What you doing?... Oh, I got the blues, boy; honest I have. Blue as a cat.... I don't know--just the indigoes. Nothing much. Ain't lit up, are you, honey?... Sure I will. Don't bring a crowd. Just you and me. I'll walk down to Gessler's drug-store and you can pick me up there.... Quit your kidding.... Ten minutes. Yeh. Good-by."

* * * * *

Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums, stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out that road--a lightning-streak of them--fearing neither penal law nor Dead Man's Curve.

Slacking only to be slacked, cars dart off the road and up a gravel driveway that encircles Claxton Inn like a lariat swung, then park themselves among the trees, lights dimmed. Placid as a manse without, what was once a private and now a public house maintains through lowered lids its discreet white-frame exterior, shades drawn, and only slightly revealing the parting of lace curtains. It is rearward where what was formerly a dining-room that a huge, screened-in veranda, very whitely lighted, juts suddenly out, and a showy hallway, bordered in potted palms, leads off that. Here Discretion dares lift her lids to rove the gravel drive for who comes there.

In a car shaped like a motor-boat and as low to the ground Mr. Charley Cox turned in and with a great throttling and choking of engine drew up among the dim-eyed monsters of the grove and directly alongside an eight-cylinder roadster with a snout like a greyhound.

"Aw, Charley, I thought you promised you wasn't going to stop!"

"Honey, sweetness, I just never was so dry."

Miss Hassiebrock laid out a hand along his arm, sitting there in the quiet car, the trees closing over them.

"There's Yiddles Farm a little farther out, Charley; let's stop there for some spring water."

He was peeling out of his gauntlets, and cramming them into spacious side pockets.

"Water, honey, can wash me, but it can't quench me."

"No high jinks to-night, though, Charley?"

"Sure--no."

They high-stepped through the gloom, and finally, with firmer step, up the gravel walk and into the white-lighted, screened-in porch.

Three waiters ran toward their entrance. A woman with a bare V of back facing them, and three plumes that dipped to her shoulders, turned square in her chair.

"Hi, Charley. Hi, Loo!"

"H'lo, Jess!"

They walked, thus guided by two waiters, through a light _confetti_ of tossed greetings, sat finally at a table half concealed by an artificial palm.

"You don't feel like sitting with Jess and the crowd, Loo?"

"Charley, hasn't that gang got you into enough mix-ups?"

"All right, honey; anything your little heart desires."

She leaned on her elbows across the table from him, smiling and twirling a great ring of black onyx round her small finger.

"Love me?"

"Br-r-r--to death!"

"Sure?"

"Sure. What'll you have, hon?"

"I don't care."

"Got any my special Gold Top on ice for me, George? Good. Shoot me a bottle and a special layout of _hors-d'oeuvre_. How's that, sweetness?"

"Yep."

"Poor little girl," he said, patting the black onyx, "with the bad old blues! I know what they are, honey; sometimes I get crazy with 'em myself."

Her lips trembled.

"It's you makes me blue, Charley."

"Now, now; just don't worry that big, nifty head of yours about me."

"The--the morning papers and all. I--I just hate to see you going so to--to the dogs, Charley--a--fellow like you--with brains."

"I'm a bad egg, girl, and what you going to do about it? I was raised like one, and I'll die like one."

"You ain't a bad egg. You just never had a chance. You been killed with coin."

"Killed with coin! Why, Loo, do you know, I haven't had to ask my old man for a cent since my poor old granny died five years ago and left me a world of money? While he's been piling it up like the Rocky Mountains I've been getting down to rock-bottom. What would you say, sweetness, if I told you I was down to my last few thousands? Time to touch my old man, eh?"

He drank off his first glass with a quaff, laughing and waving it empty before her face to give off its perfume.

"My old man is going to wake up in a minute and find me on his checking-account again. Charley boy better be making connections with headquarters or he won't find himself such a hit with the niftiest doll in town, eh?"

"Charley, you--you haven't run through those thousands and thousands and thousands the papers said you got from your granny that time?"

"It was slippery, hon; somebody buttered it."

"Charley, Charley, ain't there just no limit to your wildness?"

"You're right, girl; I've been killed with coin. My old man's been too busy all these years sitting out there in that marble tomb in Kingsmoreland biting the rims off pennies to hold me back from the devil. Honey, that old man, even if he is my father, didn't know no more how to raise a boy like me than that there salt-cellar. Every time I got in a scrape he bought me out of it, filled up the house with rough talk, and let it go at that. It's only this last year, since he's short on health, that he's kicking up the way he should have before it got too late. My old man never used to talk it out with me, honey. He used to lash it out. I got a twelve-year-old welt on my back now, high as your finger. Maybe it'll surprise you, girl, but now, since he can't welt me up any more, me and him don't exchange ten words a month."

"Did--did he hear about last night, Charley? You know what came out in the paper about making a new will if--if you ever got pulled in again for rough-housing?"

"Don't you worry that nifty head of yours about my old man ever making a new will. He's been pulling that ever since they fired me from the academy for lighting a cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill."

"Charley!"

"Next to taking it with him, he'll leave it to me before he'll see a penny go out of the family. I've seen his will, hon."

"Charley, you--you got so much good in you. The way you sent that wooden leg out to poor old lady Guthrie. The way you made Jimmy Ball go home, and the blind-school boys and all. Why can't you get yourself on the right track where you belong, Charley? Why don't you clear--out--West where it's clean?"

"I used to have that idea, Loo. West, where a fellow's got to stand on his own. Why, if I'd have met a girl like you ten years ago, I'd have made you the baby doll of the Pacific Coast. I like you, Loo. I like your style and the way you look like a million dollars. When a fellow walks into a café with you he feels like he's wearing the Hope diamond. Maybe the society in this town has given me the cold shoulder, but I'd like to see any of the safety-first boys walk in with one that's got you beat. That's what I think of you, girl."

"Aw, now, you're lighting up. Charley. That's four glasses you've taken."

"Thought I was kidding you last night--didn't you--about wedding-bells?"

"You were lit up."

"I know. You're going to watch your step, little girl, and I don't know as I blame you. You can get plenty of boys my carat, and a lot of other things thrown in I haven't got to offer you."

"As if I wouldn't like you, Charley, if you were dead broke!"

"Of course you would! There, there, girl, I don't blame any of you for feathering your nest." He was flushed now and above the soft collar, his face had relaxed into a not easily controllable smile. "Feather your nest, girl; you got the looks to do it. It's a far cry from Flamm Avenue to where a classy girl like you can land herself if she steers right. And I wish it to you, girl; the best isn't good enough."

"I--I dare you to ask me again, Charley!"

"Ask what?"

"You know. Throw your head up the way you do when you mean what you say and--ask."

He was wagging his head now insistently, but pinioning his gaze with the slightly glassy stare of those who think none too clearly.

"Honest, I don't know, beauty. What's the idea?"

"Didn't you say yourself--Gerber, out here in Claxton that--magistrate that marries you in verse--"

"By gad, I did!"

"Well--I--I--dare you to ask me again, Charley."

He leaned forward.