Chapter 13

At something after that stilly one-o'clock hour when all the sleeping noises of lath and wainscoting creak out, John Burkhardt lifted his head to the moving light of a lamp held like a torch over him, even the ridge of his body completely submerged beneath the great feather billow of an oceanic walnut bedstead.

"Yes, Hanna?"

"Wake up!"

"I been awake--"

She set the lamp down on the brown-marble top of a wash-stand, pushed back her hair with both hands, and sat down on the bed-edge, heavily breathing from a run through deserted night's streets.

"I gotta talk to you, Burkhardt--now--to-night."

"Now's no time, Hanna. Come to bed."

"Things can't go on like this, John."

He lay back slowly.

"Maybe you're right, Hanna. I been layin' up here and thinkin' the same myself. What's to be done?"

"I've got to the end of my rope."

"With so much that God has given us, Hanna--health and prosperity--it's a sin before Him that unhappiness should take root in this home."

"If you're smart, you won't try to feed me up on gospel to-night!"

"I'm willin' to meet you, Hanna, on any proposition you say. How'd it be to move down to Schaefer's boardin'-house for the winter, where it'll be a little recreation for you evenings, or say we take a trip down to Cincinnati for a week. I--"

"Oh no," she said, looking away from him and her throat throbbing. "Oh no, you don't! Them things might have meant something to me once, but you've come too late with 'em. For eight years I been eatin' out my heart with 'em. Now you couldn't pay me to live at Schaefer's. I had to beg too long for it. Cincinnati! Why, its New-Year's Eve is about as lively as a real town's Monday morning. Oh no, you don't! Oh no!"

"Come on to bed, Hanna. You'll catch cold. Your breath's freezin'."

"I'm goin'--away, for good--that's where--I'm goin'!"

Her words threatened to come out on a sob, but she stayed it, the back of her hand to her mouth.

Her gaze was riveted, and would not move, from a little curtain above the wash-stand, a guard against splashing crudely embroidered in a little hand-in-hand boy and girl.

"You--you're sayin' a good many hasty things to-night, Hanna."

"Maybe."

He plucked at a gray-wool knot in the coverlet.

"Mighty hasty things."

She turned, then, plunging her hands into the great suds of feather bed, the whole thrust of her body toward him.

"'Hasty'! Is eight years hasty? Is eight years of buried-alive hasty? I'm goin', John Burkhardt; this time I'm goin' sure--sure as my name is Hanna Long."

"Goin' where, Hanna?"

"Goin' where each day ain't like a clod of mud on my coffin. Goin' where there's a chance for a woman like me to get a look-in on life before she's as skinny a hex at twenty-seven as old lady Scog--as--like this town's full of. I'm goin' to make my own livin' in my own way, and I'd like to see anybody try to stop me."

"I ain't tryin', Hanna."

She drew back in a flash of something like surprise.

"You're willin', then?"

"No, Hanna, not willin'."

"You can't keep me from it. Incompatibility is grounds!"

The fires of her rebellion, doused for the moment, broke out again, flaming in her cheeks.

He raised himself to his elbow, regarding her there in her flush, the white line of her throat whiter because of it. She was strangely, not inconsiderably taller.

"Why, Hanna, what you been doin' to yourself?"

Her hand flew to a new and elaborately piled coiffure, a half-fringe of curling-iron, little fluffed out tendrils escaping down her neck.

"In--incompatibility is grounds."

"It's mighty becomin', Hanna. Mighty becomin'."

"It's grounds, all right!"

"'Grounds'? Grounds for what, Hanna?"

She looked away, her throat distending as she swallowed.

"Divorce."

There was a pause, then so long that she had a sense of falling through its space.

"Look at me, Hanna!"

She swung her gaze reluctantly to his. He was sitting erect now, a kind of pallor setting in behind the black beard.

"Leggo!" she said, loosening his tightening hand from her wrists. "Leggo; you hurt!"

"I--take it when a woman uses that word in her own home, she means it."

"This one does."

"You're a deacon's wife. Things--like this are--are pretty serious with people in our walk of life. We--'ain't learned in our communities yet not to take the marriage law as of God's own makin'. I'm a respected citizen here."

"So was Ed Bevins. It never hurt his hide."

"But it left her with a black name in the town."

"Who cares? She don't."

"It's no good to oppose a woman, Hanna, when she's made up her mind; but I'm willin' to meet you half-way on this thing. Suppose we try it again. I got some plans for perkin' things up a bit between us. Say we join the Buckeye Bowling Club, and--"

"No! No! No! That gang of church-pillars! I can't stand it, I tell you; you mustn't try to keep me! You mustn't! I'm a rat in a trap here. Gimme a few dollars. Hundred and fifty is all I ask. Not even alimony. Lemme apply. Gimme grounds. It's done every day. Lemme go. What's done can't be undone. I'm not blamin' you. You're what you are and I'm what I am. I'm not blamin' anybody. You're what you are, and God Almighty can't change you. Lemme go, John; for God's sake, lemme go!"

"Yes," he said, finally, not taking his eyes from her and the chin hardening so that it shot out and up. "Yes, Hanna; you're right. You got to go."

* * * * *

The skeleton of the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash. Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein, Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place from the left, and on the right Stover's Vaudeville Agency for Lilliputians divides office-space and rent with the Vibro Health Belt Company. It is a kind of murky drain, which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the leavings from Broadway. To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the prick of a fraying collar. Even Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it. A _couturier's_ model gone hippy; a specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier's books gone over. Its shops are second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as sleight-of-hand. At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its family entrances. It is the cauldron of the city's eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. It is the home of the most daring all-night eating-places, the smallest store, the largest store, the greatest revolving stage, the dreariest night court, and the drabest night birds in the world.

War has laid its talons and scratched slightly beneath the surface of Sixth Avenue. Hufnagel's Delicatessen, the briny hoar of twenty years upon it, went suddenly into decline and the hands of a receiver. Recruiting stations have flung out imperious banners. Keeley's Chop-House--Open All Night--reluctantly swings its too hospitable doors to the one-o'clock-closing mandate.

To the New-Yorker whose nights must be filled with music, preferably jazz, to pass Keeley's and find it dark is much as if Bacchus, emulating the newest historical rogue, had donned cassock and hood. Even that half of the evening east of the cork-popping land of the midnight son has waned at Keeley's. No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners. There is a cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the something that is gone.

At twelve o'clock, five of near-Broadway's best breed, in woolly anklets and wristlets and a great shaking of curls, execute the poodle-prance to half the encores of other days. May Deland, whose ripple of hip and droop of eyelid are too subtle for censorship, walks through her hula-hula dance, much of her abandon abandoned. A pair of _apaches_ whirl for one hundred and twenty consecutive seconds to a great bang of cymbals and seventy-five dollars a week. At shortly before one Miss Hanna de Long, who renders ballads at one-hour intervals, rose from her table and companion in the obscure rear of the room, to finish the evening and her cycle with "Darling, Keep the Grate-Fire Burning," sung in a contralto calculated to file into no matter what din of midnight dining.

In something pink, silk, and conservatively V, she was a careful management's last bland ingredient to an evening that might leave too Cayenne a sting to the tongue.

At still something before one she had finished, and, without encore, returned to her table.

"Gawd!" she said, and leaned her head on her hand. "I better get me a job hollerin' down a well!"

Her companion drained his stemless glass with a sharp jerking back of the head. His was the short, stocky kind of assurance which seemed to say, "Greater securities hath no man than mine, which are gilt-edged." Obviously, Mr. Lew Kaminer clipped his coupons.

"Not so bad," he said. "The song ain't dead; the crowd is."

"Say, they can't hurt my feelin's. I been a chaser-act ever since I hit the town."

"Well, if I can sit and listen to a song in long skirts twelve runnin' weeks, three or four nights every one of 'em, take it from me, there's a whistle in it somewhere."

"Just the same," she said, pushing away her glass, "my future in this business is behind me."

He regarded her, slumped slightly in his chair, celluloid toothpick dangling. There was something square about his face, abetted by a parted-in-the-middle toupee of great craftsmanship, which revealed itself only in the jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the brown of his own. There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight rotundity of his waistcoat.

"Never you mind, I'm for you, girl," he said.

There was an undeniable taking-off of years in Miss de Long. Even the very texture of her seemed younger and the skin massaged to a new creaminess, the high coiffure blonder, the eyes quicker to dart.

"Lay off, candy kid," she said. "You're going to sugar."

"Have another fizz," he said, clicking his fingers for a waiter.

"Anything to please the bold, bad man," she said.

"You're a great un," he said. "Fellow never knows how to take you from one minute to the next."

"You mean a girl never knows how to take you."

"Say," he said, "any time anybody puts anything over on you!"

"And you?"

"There you are!" he cried, eying her fizz. "Drink it down; it's good for what ails you."

"Gawd!" she said. "I wish I knew what it was is ailin' me!"

"Drink 'er down!"

"You think because you had me goin' on these things last night that to-night little sister ain't goin' to watch her step. Well, watch her watch her step," Nevertheless, she drank rather thirstily half the contents of the glass. "I knew what I was doin' every minute of the time last night, all righty. I was just showin' us a good time."

"Sure!"

"It's all right for us girls to take what we want, but the management don't want nothing rough around--not in war-time."

"Right idea!"

"There's nothing rough about me, Lew. None of you fellows can't say that about me. I believe in a girl havin' a good time, but I believe in her always keepin' her self-respect. I always say it never hurt no girl to keep her self-respect."

"Right!"

"When a girl friend of mine loses that, I'm done with her. That don't get a girl nowheres. That's why I keep to myself as much as I can and don't mix in with the girls on the bill with me, if--"

"What's become of the big blond-looker used to run around with you when you was over at the Bijou?"

"Me and Kit ain't friends no more."

"She was some looker."

"The minute I find out a girl ain't what a self-respectin' girl ought to be then that lets me out. There's nothin' would keep me friends with her. If ever I was surprised in a human, Lew, it was in Kittie Scogin. She got me my first job here in New York. I give her credit for it, but she done it because she didn't have the right kind of a pull with Billy Howe. She done a lot of favors for me in her way, but the minute I find out a girl ain't self-respectin' I'm done with that girl every time."

"That baby had some pair of shoulders!"

"I ain't the girl to run a friend down, anyway, when she comes from my home town; but I could tell tales--Gawd! I could tell tales!" There was new loquacity and a flush to Miss de Long. She sipped again, this time almost to the depth of the glass. "The way to find out about a person, Lew, is to room with 'em in the same boardin'-house. Beware of the baby stare is all I can tell you. Beware of that."

"That's what _you_ got," he said, leaning across to top her hand with his, "two big baby stares."

"Well, Lew Kaminer," she said, "you'd kid your own shadow. Callin' me a baby-stare. Of all things! Lew Kaminer!" She looked away to smile.

"Drink it all down, baby-stare," he said, lifting the glass to her lips. They were well concealed and back away from the thinning patter of the crowd, so that, as he neared her, he let his face almost graze--indeed touch, hers.

She made a great pretense of choking.

"O-oh! burns!"

"Drink it down-like a major."

She bubbled into the glass, her eyes laughing at him above its rim.

"Aw gone!"

He clicked again with his fingers.

"Once more, Charlie!" he said, shoving their pair of glasses to the table-edge.

"You ain't the only money-bag around the place!" she cried, flopping down on the table-cloth a bulky wad tied in one corner of her handkerchief.

"Well, whatta you know about that? Pay-day?"

"Yeh-while it lasts. I hear there ain't goin' to be no more cabarets or Camembert cheese till after the war."

"What you going to do with it--buy us a round of fizz?"

She bit open the knot, a folded bill dropping to the table, uncurling.

"Lord!" she said, contemplating and flipping it with her finger-tip. "Where I come from that twenty-dollar bill every week would keep me like a queen. Here it ain't even chicken feed."

"You know where there's more chicken feed waitin' when you get hard up, sister. You're slower to gobble than most. You know what I told you last night, kiddo--you need lessons."

"What makes me sore, Lew, is there ain't an act on this bill shows under seventy-five. It goes to show the higher skirts the higher the salary in this business."

"You oughta be singin' in grand op'ra."

"Yeh--sure! The diamond horseshoe is waitin' for the chance to land me one swift kick. It only took me twelve weeks and one meal a day to land this after Kittie seen to it that they let me out over at the Bijou. Say, I know where I get off in this town, Lew. If there's one thing I know, it's where I get off. I ain't a squab with a pair of high-priced ankles. I'm down on the agencies' books as a chaser-act, and I'm down with myself for that. If there's one thing I ain't got left, it's illusions. Get me? Illusions."

She hitched sidewise in her chair, dipped her forefinger into her fresh glass, snapped it at him so that he blinked under the tiny spray.

"That for you!" she said, giggling. She was now repeatedly catching herself up from a too constant impulse to repeat that giggle.

"You little devil!" he said, reaching back for his handkerchief.

She dipped again, this time deeper, and aimed straighter.

"Quit!" he said, catching her wrist and bending over it. "Quit it, or I'll bite!"

"Ow! Ouch!"

Her mouth still resolute not to loosen, she jerked back from him. There was only the high flush which she could not control, and the gaze, heavy lidded, was not so sure as it might have been. She was quietly, rather pleasantly, dizzy.

"I wish--" she said. "I--wi-ish--"

"What do you wi-ish?"

"Oh, I--I dunno what I wish!"

"If you ain't a card!"

He had lighted a cigar, and, leaning toward her, blew out a fragrant puff to her.

"M-m-m!" she said; "it's a Cleopatra."

"Nop."

"A El Dorado."

"Guess again."

"A what, then?"

"It's a Habana Queen. Habana because it reminds me of Hanna."

"Aw--you!"

At this crowning puerility Mr. Kaminer paused suddenly, as if he had detected in his laughter a bray.

"Is Habana in the war, Lew?"

"Darned if I know exactly."

"Ain't this war just terrible, Lew?"

"Don't let it worry you, girl. If it puts you out of business, remember, it's boosted my stocks fifty per cent. You know what I told you about chicken feed."

She buried her nose in her handkerchief, turning her head. Her eyes had begun to crinkle.

"It--it's just awful! All them sweet boys!"

"Now, cryin' ain't goin' to help. You 'ain't got no one marchin' off."

"That's just it. I 'ain't got no one. Everything is something awful, ain't it?" Her sympathies and her risibilities would bubble to the surface to confuse her. "Awful!"

He scraped one forefinger against the other.

"Cry-baby! Cry-baby, stick your little finger in your little eye!"

She regarded him wryly, her eyes crinkled now quite to slits.

"You can laugh!"

"Look at the cry-baby!"

"I get so darn blue."

"Now--now--"

"Honest to Gawd, Lew, I get so darn blue I could die."

"You're a nice girl, and I'd like to see anybody try to get fresh with you!"

"Do you--honest, Lew--like me?"

"There's something about you, girl, gets me every time. Cat-eyes! Kitty-eyes!"

"Sometimes I get so blue--get to thinkin' of home and the way it all happened. You know the way a person will. Home and the--divorce and the way it all happened with--him--and how I come here and--where it's got me, and--and I just say to myself, 'What's the use?' You know, Lew, the way a person will. Back there, anyways, I had a home. There's something in just havin' a home, lemme tell you. Bein' a somebody in your own home."

"You're a somebody any place they put you."

"You never seen the like the way it all happened, Lew. So quick! The day I took the train was like I was walkin' for good out of a dream. Not so much as a post-card from there since--"

"Uh--uh--now--cry-baby!"

"I--ain't exactly sorry, Lew; only God knows, more'n once in those twelve weeks out of work I was for goin' back and patchin' it up with him. I ain't exactly sorry, Lew, but--but there's only one thing on God's earth that keeps me from being sorry."

"What?"

"You."

He flecked his cigar, hitching his arm up along the chair-back, laughed, reddened slightly.

"That's the way to talk! These last two nights you been lightin' up with a man so he can get within ten feet of you. Now you're shoutin'!"

She drained her glass, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes.

She was sitting loosely forward now, her hand out on his.

"You're the only thing on God's earth that's kept me from--sneakin" back there--honest. Lew, I'd have gone back long ago and eat dirt to make it up with him--if not for you. I--ain't built like Kittie Scogin and those girls. I got to be self-respectin' with the fellows or nothing. They think more of you in the end--that's my theory."

"Sure!"

"A girl's fly or--she just naturally ain't that way. That's where all my misunderstanding began with Kittie--when she wanted me to move over in them rooms on Forty-ninth Street with her--a girl's that way or she just ain't that way!"

"Sure!"

"Lew--will you--are you--you ain't kiddin' me all these weeks? Taxicabbin' me all night in the Park and--drinkin' around this way all the time together. You 'ain't been kiddin' me, Lew?"

He shot up his cigar to an oblique.

"Now you're shoutin'!" he repeated. "It took three months to get you down off your high horse, but now we're talkin' the same language."

"Lew!"

"It ain't every girl I take up with; just let that sink in. I like 'em frisky, but I like 'em cautious. That's where you made a hit with me. Little of both. Them that nibble too easy ain't worth the catch."

She reached out the other hand, covering his with her both.

"You're--talkin' weddin'-bells, Lew?"

He regarded her, the ash of his cigar falling and scattering down his waistcoat.

"What bells?"

"Weddin', Lew." Her voice was as thin as a reed.

"O Lord!" he said, pushing back slightly from the table. "Have another fizz, girl, and by that time we'll be ready for a trip in my underground balloon. Waiter!"

She drew down his arm, quickly restraining it. She was not so sure now of controlling the muscles of her mouth.

"Lew!"

"Now--now--"

"Please, Lew! It's what kept me alive. Thinkin' you meant that. Please, Lew! You ain't goin' to turn out like all the rest in this town? You--the first fellow I ever went as far as--last night with. I'll stand by you, Lew, through thick and thin. You stand by me. You make it right with me, Lew, and--"

He cast a quick glance about, grasped at the sides of the table, and leaned toward her, _sotto_.

"For God's sake, hush! Are you crazy?"

"No," she said, letting the tears roll down over the too frank gyrations of her face--"no, I ain't crazy. I only want you to do the right thing by me, Lew. I'm--blue. I'm crazy afraid of the bigness of this town. There ain't a week I don't expect my notice here. It's got me. If you been stringin' me along like the rest of 'em, and I can't see nothing ahead of me but the struggle for a new job--and the tryin' to buck up against what a decent girl has got to--"

"Why, you're crazy with the heat, girl! I thought you and me was talking the same language. I want to do the right thing by you. Sure I do! Anything in reason is yours for the askin'. That's what I been comin' to."

"Then, Lew, I want you to do by me like you'd want your sister done by."

"I tell you you're crazy. You been hitting up too many fizzes lately."

"I--"

"You ain't fool enough to think I'm what you'd call a free man? I don't bring my family matters down here to air 'em over with you girls. You're darn lucky that I like you well enough to--well, that I like you as much as I do. Come, now; tell you what I'm goin' to do for you: You name your idea of what you want in the way of--"

"O God! Why don't I die? I ain't fit for nothing else!"

He cast a glance around their deserted edge of the room. A waiter, painstakingly oblivious, stood two tables back.

"Wouldn't I be better off out of it? Why don't I die?"

He was trembling down with a suppression of rage and concern for the rising gale in her voice.

"You can't make a scene in public with me and get away with it. If that's your game, it won't land you anywhere. Stop it! Stop it now and talk sense, or I'll get up. By God! if you get noisy, I'll get up and leave you here with the whole place givin' you the laugh. You can't throw a scare in me."

But Miss de Long's voice and tears had burst the dam of control. There was an outburst that rose and broke on a wave of hysteria.

"Lemme die--that's all I ask! What's there in it for me? What has there ever been? Don't do it, Lew! Don't--don't!"

It was then Mr. Kaminer pushed back his chair, flopped down his napkin, and rose, breathing heavily enough, but his face set in an exaggerated kind of quietude as he moved through the maze of tables, exchanged a check for his hat, and walked out.

For a stunned five minutes her tears, as it were, seared, she sat after him.

The waiter had withdrawn to the extreme left of the deserted edge of the room, talking behind his hand to two colleagues in servility, their faces listening and breaking into smiles.

Finally Miss de Long rose, moving through the zigzag paths of empty tables toward a deserted dressing-room. In there she slid into black-velvet slippers and a dark-blue walking-skirt, pulled on over the pink silk, tucking it up around the waist so that it did not sag from beneath the hem, squirmed into a black-velvet jacket with a false dicky made to emulate a blouse-front, and a blue-velvet hat hung with a curtain-like purple face-veil.

As she went out the side, Keeley's was closing its front doors.