Chapter 18

On a glass runway built over the heads of the assembled, a crystal aisle for satin feet, the row of soubrettes suddenly appeared, peering over the crystal rail, singing down upon the sea of marcelled, bald, and dead heads. Men, sheepish of their smiles but with the small heels overhead clanging like castanets into their spirits, dared to glance up.

"Gad, Herman! What'll they think up next? Whatta you know about that--all those little devils dancing right over our heads!"

"There she is!"

"Who?"

"The little one in the boy's black-satin suit, with the black curls bobbing!"

"Watch out, Herm! You'll die of crick in the neck."

"I don't see any blinkers on you!"

"Hey, old man! Your mouth's open."

"I know. I opened it," said Mr. Loeb, his head back and eyes that were suddenly bold staring up at the twinkling aisle.

At a table adjoining, a man reached up, flecking one of the tiny black-satin feet with a whirl of his napkin.

Then Mr. Herman Loeb, of St. Louis, committed an act of spontaneous combustion. When came the turn of the black satin and the bobbing curls to bend over the rail directly above him, he flung wide his arms, overturning a wine bottle.

"Jump!" he cried.

Beneath the short, black curls a mouth shaped like a bud reluctant to open, blew him a kiss. Then came a cue of music like an avalanche, and quicker than Harlequin's wink the aisle was clean.

"Gad!" said Mr. Loeb, his strong profile thrust forward and a light on it.

"That little one with the black curls? Say! You can put her on your watch-fob and take her home."

"Wouldn't mind!" said Mr. Loeb.

"You and Moe Marx are like all the women-haters. You don't know it, but you're walking in your sleep and the tenth-story window's open."

"We oughtn't to come up here in business clothes," said Mr. Loeb, eying his cuff-edges.

A woman sang of love. A chorus, crowned and girdled in inflated toy balloons, wreathed in and out among the tables.

"She's not in that crowd."

Men to whom life for the most part was grim enough vied for whose cigarette end should prick the painted bubbles. A fusillade ensued; explosions on the gold-powdered air--a battle _de luxe!_

Mr. Kahn threw back his head, yawned, and slid a watch from his waistcoat pocket.

"W-ell, a little of this goes a long way. If we want to pull out of this town day after to-morrow we've got to get down to Cedar Street early in the morning on that sweater job lot. It's about time for us to be getting across to the hotel."

"Wait!" said Mr. Loeb.

A jingling and a right merry cacophony of sound came fast upon the bubble bombardment, and then, to a light runnel of song, the row of twenty-four, harnessed in slotted sleigh-bells and with little-girl flounced frocks to their very sophisticated pink-silk knees.

The devices of vaudeville are perennial. Rigoletto, who set a court's sides aching, danced to bells. The row of twenty-four, pink and white as if the cradle had just yielded them up, shivered suddenly into an ecstasy of sound, the jerked-up shoulder of one, the tossing curls of another, the naughty shrug of a third, eking out a melody.

A laugh rose off the crowd.

"Say, this town'll fall for anything! That act's got barnacles. But the little devils look cute, though. Say--say, old man, cut that out! This is no place for your mother's son. Say!"

Mr. Loeb was leaning forward across the table, his head well ahead of his shoulders. From the third from the end of the row of twenty-four, a shoulder shrugging to the musical nonsense of bells was arching none too indirectly toward him, and once the black curls bobbed, giving a share of tremolo to the melody. But the bob was carefully directed, and Herman Loeb returned it in fashion, only more vehemently and with repetition.

"Say, Herman, enough is enough! You'll have her here at the table next. It's like Al Suss always says, the reason he woke up one morning and found himself married to the first pony in the sextet was because he stuck a stamp upside down on a letter to her and found he could be held for a proposal in stamp language."

To a great flare of the Negroid music, the row of twenty-four suddenly turned turtle, and prone on a strip of rug, heads to audience and faces to ceiling, twenty-four pairs of legs, ankleted in bells, kicked up a syncopated melody. From a Niagara of lace, insteps quivered an arpeggio. A chromatic scale bounced off a row of rapidly pointing toes. The third from the end, seized with sudden chill, quivered into grace notes, small pink feet kicking violently to the chandelier.

Men red with laughter pounded their plates. The rhythmic convulsion passed down the prostrate line, forty-eight little feet twinkled a grand finale, and the curtains swung, then opened, remaining so.

The line of twenty-four danced down and across the wide hair-line that separates life and stage, butterflies sipping from table to table. The cabaret was done. Lights resumed, and the business of food and drink.

Mr. Loeb flung out an arm, pulling awry a carefully averted pink sash.

"Say, little Jingle Bells, you and your friend!"

"Cut it out, Herm! If we want to be down on Cedar Street by--"

"What's your hurry, little one?"

"It ain't mine; it belongs to the management."

"Won't you join us?"

"Herm, that job-lot of sweaters--"

"Oh, come on, little Jingle Bells!"

"My friend, too?"

"Sure your friend."

They teetered, the two of them like animated dolls, arm in arm, and so at ease.

"Here, you little Black Curls, sit next to me, and you, Blondey, over there by my brother-in-law."

"What'll you have, girls?"

"Anchovies and fine-chopped onions for mine. Tell 'em in the kitchen, waiter, I said _fine_, and if the gentlemen are going to order wine, bring me a plate of oyster crackers first to take off the edge of my emptiness."

"Sure, another bottle of wine, waiter."

"Hermie, we--"

"And you, little Jingle Bells, same as Blondey's order?"

"Yeh."

"Say, you know what?"

"No. What?"

"I fell for those bouncing black curls of yours before I was in the place five minutes."

At that there was an incredible flow of baby talk.

"Gemmemen ike ikkie gurl wiz naughty-naughty black curl-curlies?"

"You bet your life I do," said Mr. Loeb, unashamed of comprehension.

Mr. Kahn flashed another look at his watch.

"Say, don't you know, you girls oughtn't to keep us boys up so late. Ain't there no wear out to you?"

The yellow curls to his right bounced sharply.

"He asks if there's a wear out to us, Cleone? I wish it to you this minute, Baldy, that you had the muscles in the back of my legs. I guess you think it's choice for us girls to come out on the floor after the show!"

"Sylvette!"

"Yah, it's my New-Year's resolution to tell the truth for thirty minutes if I'm bounced for it. If you got to know it, it's a ten-per-cent. rake-off for us girls on every bottle of golden vichy you boys blow us to."

"Honest, Sylvette, you're wearing scrambled eggs instead of brains to-night. Why don't you cry a few brinies for the gemmemen while you're at it!"

That so quickened Mr. Loeb's risibilities that he dropped his hand over Miss Cleone St. Claire's, completely covering yet not touching it.

"You're a scream, kiddo! Gee! I like you!"

She drank with her chin flung up and her throat very white.

"Bubbles! Bubbles! God bless all my troubles!"

"Well, I'll be darned!" said Mr. Kahn, smiling at her.

"The gemmemen from out of town?"

"St. Louis."

"I had a friend out there--Joe Kelsannie, of Albuquerque. Remember him, Sylvette?"

"Do I!"

"I'm going out there myself some day if the going's good, and get me a cowboy west of Newark."

Mr. Loeb leaned forward, smiling into her quick-fire eyes.

"I'll take you!"

"Stick her on your watch-fob, Herman."

"No, sirree, I'll take her life size."

"Watch out, Hermie; remember the upside-down postage stamp!"

"Want to go, Jingle Bells?"

"Sure."

"But I'm on the level, little one. No kidding. Day after to-morrow. St. Louis--with me!"

Miss Cleone St. Claire drew herself up, the doll look receding somewhat from her gaze.

"Say, bo, you got me wrong. I'm one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand chorus girls you could introduce your sister to. Aren't I, Syl?"

"You let that kid alone," said Miss Sylvette de Long, in a tone not part of her role. "When the traffic policeman sticks up his mitt it's time to halt, see?" Lines not before discernible in Miss De Long's face had long since begun to creep out, smoky shadows beneath her eyes and a sunburst of fine lines showing through the powder like stencil designs.

"Come on, Herm. It's getting late, and if we want to be down on Cedar--"

"You think I'm kidding this little black-eyed chum of yours, don't you, Blondey?"

"Sure not! You want 'er to grace the head of your table and wear the family heirlooms!"

"Well, Sam, you're my brother-in-law--married to my own sister and living under the same roof with me--am I a habitual lady-fusser, or do they call me Hermie the Hermit at home?"

"Never knew him to talk ten straight words to a skirt before, girls," said Mr. Kahn through a yawn; "and if you don't believe it, go out and ask Louis Slupsky, who used to play chinies with him."

"Say, you," said Miss De Long, edging slightly, "you're about as funny as a machine-gun, you are! If you got a private life, why ain't you back in St. Louis a night like this, showing her and the kids a good time?"

She was frankly tired, her eyelids darkening.

"I wish to Heaven I was," said Mr. Kahn, suddenly. "Take it from me, girl, it was nothing but a business hang-over kept me. Come, Herm, if we--"

"You think I'm kidding little Jingle Bells, don't you?"

Miss St. Claire sat back against her chair; her black eyes had quieted. "If you ain't kidding you must be crazy with the heat or dr--"

"Look at my glass. Have I touched it?"

"The man's raving, Syl! Wants to marry me and take me back to St. Louis, Thursday."

"Cut the comedy and come! Herm, it's getting on to three in the morning."

"This little girl keeps thinking I'm kidding, Blondey. I always knew if I ever fell for matrimony it would be just like this. Right off the reel. No funny business. Just bing! Bang! Done!"

"Catch me while I swoon--but he sounds on the level, Cleone."

"Well, what if he is? Of all the nerve! Whatta you know about me? How do you know I haven't got three kids and a crippled husband at home? How do you know--?"

"I know, little Jingle Bells! Why, I was as sure of you, the minute I clapped eyes on you, as if we'd been raised next door to each other. I can see right down in your little life like it was this glass of wine."

Miss St. Claire threw out her arms in a beautiful and sleepy gesture.

"Well, boys, this is a nice little party, but I got to get up at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon, and I need the sleep. Oh, how I love my morning sleep!" She drew back, her bare outflung arm pushing her from the table. "If you'll call me and my room-mate a taxi--"

"No, you don't, Jingle Bells!"

He placed a hand that trembled slightly on the sleeved part of her arm. She opened wider her very wide black eyes.

"Are you bats?" she said.

"I'm going to marry you and take you home with me, if I have to carry you off like a partridge."

"Cleone, I tell you the man means it!"

"You're right, Blondey. I never meant anything more in my life."

A sudden shortness of manner crept over Mr. Kahn.

"Man, you're drunk!" he cried, springing to his feet.

"See my glass!"

"Then you're crazy!"

"Sit down, old Baldy. Why's he crazy? That little room-mate of mine is as straight a little girl as--"

"Why, I tell you he's crazy! That man's the head of a big business. He can't kick up any nonsense like this. Come on, Herm, cut the comedy. It's time we were getting across to our hotel. Look at the crowd thinning, and what's left is getting rough. Come!"

"If you don't know how to behave yourself, Sam, in the presence of these ladies, maybe you better go back to the hotel alone. I'm going to see these young ladies to their door, and before we go me and this little girl are going to understand each other."

Mr. Kahn sat down again in some stupefaction.

"Well, of all the nerve! Who are you? Whatta you think I am? Syl, what's his game?"

Miss De Long thrust forward her tired and thinning face; her eyes had a mica gleam.

"Cleone, he wants to marry you. A decent man with a decent face from a decent town has taken a shine to you and wants to marry you. M-a-r-r-y! Do you get it, girl?"

"How do you know he's decent? I don't know no more about him than he knows about me. I--"

"'Ain't you got no hunch on life, girl? Look at him! That's how I know he's decent. So would you if you'd been in this business as long as me. Can't you tell a real honest-to-God man when you see one? A business man at that!"

"You got me right, Blondey. Kahn, Loeb & Schulien, Ladies' Wear, St. Louis. Here's my card. You give me an hour to-morrow, Jingle Bells, and I'll do all the credential stuff your little heart desires. Louis Slupsky knows me and my whole family. His mother used to stuff feather pillows for mine. Kahn here is my brother-in-law and partner in business. He's a slow cuss and 'ain't grasped the situation yet. But are you on, little one? Is it St. Louis Thursday morning, as Mrs.--?"

"Herm! You're cr--"

"Syl--what'll I--do?"

"An on-the-level guy, Cleone. Marry! Do you hear? M-a-r-r-y! Say, and it couldn't happen to me!"

"Herman, man, I tell you you're off your head. Think once of your home--ma, Etta, grandma--with a _goy_ girl that--"

"Easy there, Baldy, you're adding up wrong. You and her both celebrates the same Sundays. If anybody should ask you for Sylvette de Long's birth certificate, look it up under the P's. Birdie Pozner. It's the same with my friend. Cleone, tell the gemmemen your real name! Well, I'll tell it for you. Sadie Mosher, sister to the great Felix Mosher who played heavy down at Shefsky's theater for twenty years. _Goy!_ Say, Sammie, it's too bad a nut from the bug-house bought the Brooklyn Bridge to-day or I'd try to sell it to you."

"Little Jingle Bells, if I put you in a taxi now and shoot up those credentials, will you marry me to-morrow at noon?"

"I--oh, I dunno."

"Marry, he says to you, girl. Think of the minus number of times girls like us get that little word whispered to 'em. Think of the short season. Moncrieff's grouch. The back muscles of your legs! Marry, he says to you, girl! Marry!"

"To-morrow at noon, little one?"

"I--I sleep till three."

"And it couldn't 'a' been me!"

"Little Jingle Bells?"

"Why, y-yes, I--I'm on."

At three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, in a magistrate's office, beneath a framed engraving of a judicial court in wigged session, Herman Schulien Loeb and Sadie Helen Mosher became as one. A bar of scant metropolitan sunshine, miraculously let in by a cleft between two skyscrapers, lay at the feet of the bride.

Slightly arear of them: Mr. Louis Slupsky; Mr. Samuel Kahn, with a tinge the color of apoplexy in his face; and Miss Sylvette de Long, her face thrust forward as if she heard melody. The voice of the magistrate rose like a bird in slow flight, then settled to a brief drone.

* * * * *

East is East and West is West, and St. Louis is neither. It lies like a mediator, the westerly hand of the east end of the country stretching across the sullenest part of the Mississippi to clasp the easterly hand of the west end of the country.

Indians have at one time or another left their chirography upon the face of St. Louis. But all that is effaced now under the hot lava of Americanism that is covering the major cities in more or less even layers. Now it stands atop its Indian mounds, a metropolis of almost a million souls, a twenty-story office-building upon the site of an old trading-post, and a subway threatening the city's inners. There is a highly restricted residence district given over to homes of the most stucco period of the Italian Renaissance, and an art-museum, as high on the brow of a hill as the Athenians loved to build. St. Louis has not yet a Champs-Elysees or a Fifth Avenue. And of warm evenings it takes its walks without hats. Neither is the cafe or the cabaret its evening solace.

It dines, even in its renaissance section, placidly _chez soi;_ the family activities of the day here thrown into a common pool of discussion.

On Washington Boulevard, probably sixty dollars a foot removed from the renaissance section, architecture suddenly turns an indifferent shoulder to period, Queen Anne rubbing sloping roof with neighbor's concrete sleeping-porch of the hygienic period. Only the building-line is maintained, the houses sitting comfortably back and a well-hosed strip of sidewalk, bordered in hardy maples, running clear and white out to De Balaviere Avenue, where the _art-nouveau_ apartment-house begins to invade. In winter bare branches meet in deadlock over this walk. On the smooth macadamized road of Washington Boulevard automobiles try out their speed limit.

One such wintry day, with the early dusk already invading, Mrs. Herman Loeb, with red circles round her very black eyes, and her unrouged face rather blotched, sat in one of the second-floor-front rooms of a double buff-brick house on Washington Boulevard, hunched up in a red-velvet chair, chin cupped in palm, and gazing, through perfectly adjusted Honiton lace curtains, at the steady line of home-to-dinner motor-cars.

Warmth lay in that room, and a conservative mahogany elegance--a great mahogany double bed, immaculately covered in white, with a large monogram heavily hand-embroidered in its center; a mahogany swell-front dresser, with a Honiton lace cover and a precise outlay of monogramed silver. Over it a gilt-framed French engraving with "Maternal Love" writ in elegant script beneath. A two-toned red rug ate in footsteps.

Mrs. Loeb let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes. In her dark-stuff dress with its sheer-white collar, she was part of the note of the room, except that her small bosom rose and fell too rapidly. A pungent odor of cookery began to invade; the street lamps of Washington Boulevard to pop out. The door from the hallway opened, but at the entrance of her mother-in-law Mrs. Loeb did not rise, only folded one foot closer under her.

"You, Sadie?"

"Yes."

"Herman home yet?"

"No."

"Smell? I fixed him red cabbage to-night."

"Yes, I smell."

"How she sits here in the dark. Thank goodness, Sadie, electricity we don't have to economize on."

She pushed a wall key, a center chandelier of frosted electric bulbs springing into radiance. In its immediate glare Mrs. Loeb regarded her daughter-in-law, inert there beside the window.

"Get your embroidery, Sadie, and come down by me and Etta till the men get home to supper. I want her to show you that cut-work stitch she's putting in her lunch napkins."

"Ugh!"

"What?"

Mrs. Bertha Loeb approached with the forward peer of the nearsighted. Time and maternity had had their whacks at her figure, her stoutness enhanced by a bothersome shelf of bust, but her face--the same virile profile of her son's and with the graying hair parted tightly from it--guiltless of lines, except now, regarding her daughter-in-law, a horizontal crease came into her brow.

"You want to go sit a while by grandma, then?"

"No. Gee! can't--can't a girl just sit up in her room quiet? I'm all right."

"I didn't say, Sadie, you wasn't all right. Only a young girl with everything to be thankful for don't need to sit up in her room like it was a funeral, with her mother and sister and grandma in the same house."

On the mahogany arms of her chair Mrs. Herman Loeb's small hand closed in a tight fist over her damp wad of handkerchief,

"I--I--"

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Sadie, you been crying again."

"What if I have?"

"A fine answer from a girl to her mother."

"I--you--you drive me to it--your questions--"

"I shouldn't have the interest of my own son's wife at heart!"

"Can't a girl get--get blue?"

"Blue?"

"Yes, blue."

Mrs. Bertha Loeb reached out her hand with its wide marriage band slightly indented in flesh; the back of that hand was speckled with large, lightish freckles and trembled slightly.

"Sadie, ain't there just no way we can make you feel happy in St. Louis? Last night through the door to my room I couldn't help hear again you and Herman with a scene. Take your feet down off the plush, Sadie."

"Oh yes, you heard, all right."

"'Ain't you got a good home here, Sadie? Everything in the world a girl could wish for! A husband as good as gold, like his poor dead father before him. 'Ain't we done everything, me and my Etta, to make you feel how--how glad we are to have you for our Hermie's wife?"

"Oh, I know, I know."

"What maybe we felt in the beginning--well, wasn't it natural, an only son and coming such a surprise--all that's over now. Why, it's a pleasure to see how grandma she loves you."

"I--I'm all right, I tell you."

"Didn't we even fix it you should go in a flat on Waterman Avenue housekeeping for yourself, if you wanted it?"

"Yes, and tie myself down to this dump yet. Not much!"

"Well, I only hope, Sadie Loeb, you never got in your life to live in a worse dump. I know this much, I have tried to do my part. Did I sign over this house to you and Herman for a wedding present, giving only to my own daughter the row of Grand Avenue stores?"

"I never said you didn't."

"Have you got the responsibility even to run your own house, with me and Etta carrying it on like always?"

"Am I complaining?"

"Do I ask of you one thing, Sadie, except maybe that you learn a little housekeeping and watch how I order from the butcher, things that every wife should know if she needs it or not? In the whole year you been my daughter, Sadie, have I asked of you more than you should maybe help the up-stairs girl a little mornings, and do a little embroidery for your linen-chest, and that maybe, instead of sleeping so late till noon every morning, you should get up and have breakfast with your husband?"

"If you begin going over all that again I--I'll just yell!"

"With anybody pouting in the house I just 'ain't got heart to do nothing. I don't see, Sadie, that you had such fine connections in the East that you shouldn't be satisfied here."

"You just leave my friends in the East out of it. If you wanna know it, they're a darn sight better than the wads of respectability I see waddlin' in here to swap Kaffee Klatsches with you!"

"Just let me tell you, Sadie Loeb, you can be proud such ladies call on you. A girl what don't think no more of her husband's business connections than not to come down-stairs when Mrs. Nathan Bamberger calls! Maybe our friends out here got being good wifes and good housekeepers on the brain more as high kicking in New York; but just the same Mrs. Nathan Bamberger, what can buy and sell you three times over, ain't ashamed to go in her Lindell Avenue kitchen, when her husband or her son likes red cabbage, what you can't hire cooked, or once in a while a miltz."

"Say, if I've heard that once, I've--"

"Then, too, Sadie, since we're talking--it's a little thing--I haven't liked to talk about it, but I--I got the first time I should hear the word _ma_ on your lips. You think it's so nice that a daughter-in-law should always call me 'Say,' like a bed-post?"

"I--I can't, Mrs. Loeb--it--it just won't come--mother."

"Don't tell me you don't know any better! A girl what can be so nice with poor old blind grandma, like you been, can be nice with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, too, if she wants to be. I didn't want I should ever have to talk to you like this, Sadie, but sometimes a--a person she just busts out."

And then Mrs. Herman Loeb leaped forward in her chair, her small tight fist pounding each word: