Chapter 6

"I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh little rag-timers that ain't worth powder and shot, bringing down the finest kind of fellows, and Stella never asked out or nothing, I always say to myself, 'I can't understand it.' Take me--what Arch Sensenbrenner ever seen in me, with Stella and her complexion working in the same department--"

"You got a way, Cora. There's just something about me don't take with the boys. Honest, if I could only see one of you girls alone with a fellow once, to see how you do it!"

"Just listen to her, Mrs. Schump, with her eyes and complexion and all!"

"There's not a reason my girl shouldn't have it as good and better than the best of them. She's a good girl, Cora. Stella's a good girl to me."

"Aw, mamma--"

"Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's--"

'"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and--"

"Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat."

"She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my girl-days--and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl as my Stella--do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me? Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him."

"Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's got a right good figure, she has."

"Lots of good it does me! I--It's just like my brains to go right to my hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called for me for that party at your house--honest, I couldn't open my mouth to him."

"Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party, I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.' Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just, 'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"

"I never could be fresh with a boy. Take that time at your party. I bet your brother Ed would have liked me better if I'd have got out in the middle of the floor with him, like he wanted me to and like Gert did, to see who could blow the biggest bunch of suds off his stein. I never could be fresh with a fellow."

"That's just the trouble, Mrs. Schump. Stella don't see the difference between what's fresh and what's just fun. Is there anything wrong about one stein of beer in a jolly crowd? A girl can be nice without being goody-good. If there's anything a fellow hates, it's a goody-good. Take a fellow like Arch--you think he'd have any time for me if I wasn't a good-enough sport to take a glass of beer with him maybe once a week when he gets to feeling thirsty? Nothing rough. Everything in moderation, I always say. But there's a difference, Mrs. Schump, between being rough and being a goody-good."

"There's something in what you say, Cora. I've had her by me so much, maybe I've tried to raise her a little over-genteel. There ain't one single bad appetite she's got to be afraid of. It's not in her. I used to tell her poor father, one glass of beer could make him so crazy loony he never had to try how two tasted."

"I'm bashful, and what you goin' to do about it?"

"Say, you and Ed's foreman ought to meet together! Honest, you'd be a pair! Ed brought him to the house one night. Finest boy you ever seen. Thirty-five a week, steady as you make 'em; and when they put in girls to work down at the munitions-plant where him and Ed works, Ed said it was all they could do to keep him from throwing up his job from fright. Whatta you know? A dandy fellow like him, with a dagger-shaped scar clear down his arm from standing by his job that time when the whole south end of the plant exploded. A fellow that could save a whole plant and two hundred lives afraid to face a few skirts! Crazy to get married. Told Ed so. Always harping on his idea of blue eyes and yellow hair, and then, when he gets the chance, afraid of a few skirts!"

"That's me every time with fellows. I get to feelin' down inside of me something terrible--scary--and all."

"Say, I'll tell you what! I'll get Ed to bring him down to Gert Cobb's party next Saturday night, and you come, too."

"I?"

"There's two of a kind for you, Mrs. Schump. A fellow that's more afraid of girls than explosions, and a girl that's afraid to blow a little foam off a glass of beer! Them two ought to meet. Me and Arch and Ed'll fix it up. How's that for a scheme? Now say I ain't your friend! Are you game?"

"I don't go out tryin' to meet fellows that way."

"You see, Mrs. Schump, the way she puts a gold fence around herself?"

"Cora's puttin' herself out for you, Stella. There's no harm in a Saturday night's party in the company of Cora and some genteel friends."

"Gert Cobb don't know I'm on earth."

"You hear, Mrs. Schump? Is it any wonder she don't get out? All I got to do is say the word, and any friend of mine is welcome in Gert Cobb's house."

"I'll make you up them five yards of pink mull for it, Stella. It's a shame that pretty dress-pattern from your two birthdays ago has never had the occasion to be made up. It's nice of Cora to be puttin' herself out."

"Look at 'er, like I was asking her to a funeral!"

"There's such a pretty sash I been savin' to make up with that mull, Cora. A handsome black-moire length of ribbon off a beaded basque her father gimme our first Christmas married."

"I'll lend her my pink pearls to wear. Honest, I never knew a girl could wear pink like Stella."

Miss Schump leaned forward in the lamplight, the myriad of tight little braids at angles, but her eyes widening to their astounding blueness.

"Not your--pink beads, Cora?"

"You heard me the first time, didn't you? 'Pink' was what I said."

"Ma!"

"Now ain't that nice of Cora?"

"Quick--are you game?"

"Why, yes--Cora."

* * * * *

There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem to run at haphazard angles each to the other--that less sooty part of Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement rising insolently before the scar is cold.

It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three of these streets.

There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus, the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact, tired old rows of tired old houses.

On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked, deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of number nines; on the east by Miss Cora Kinealy, very much of the occasion in a peaked hood faced in eider-down and a gay silk bag of slippers dangling; on the west by Miss Stella Schump, a pink scarf entwining her head like a Tanagra.

"Honest, Cora, I feel just like I'm intruding."

"'Intrudin'! Would I have invited her if we didn't want her, Arch?"

"Naw."

"'There's always room for one more,' is my motto. I believe it always comes home to the girl that don't share her good times. If me and Arch couldn't call by for a girl on our way to a party, I'd feel sorry for us. Give her your arm, Arch."

"Here! I tried once to, and she wouldn't take it."

Miss Schump hooked a highly diffident hand into Mr. Sensenbrenner's sharply jutted elbow.

"You two go on and talk together. I've chewed Arch's right ear off already."

"It's a grand evenin'--ain't it, Mr. Sensenbrenner?"

At that from Miss Schump, Miss Kinealy executed a very soprano squeal that petered out in a titter of remonstrances.

"Arch Sensenbrenner, if you don't stop pinching me! Honest, my arm's black and blue! Honest! What'll Stella think we are? Now cut it out!"

They walked a block in silence, but, beside her, Miss Schump could feel them shaking to a duet of suppressed laughter, and the red in her face rose higher and a little mustache of the tiniest of perspiration beads came out over her lip. The desire to turn back, the sudden ache for the quietude of the little halo of lamplight and the swollen finger-joints of her mother in and out at work, were almost not to be withstood.

"I--You--you and Mr. Sensenbrenner go on, Cora. I--me not knowin' Gertie Cobb and all--I--I--feel I'm intruding. You and him go on. Please!"

Miss Kinealy crossed to her, kindly at once and sobered.

"Now, Stella Schump, you're coming right to this party with me and Arch. We can't do more than tell her she's welcome, can we, Arch?"

"Sure."

"I promised your mother I'm going to see to it that you get away from her apron-strings and out among young folks more, and you're coming right to this party with me and Arch. Ain't I right, Arch?"

"Sure."

"You mustn't feel bad, honey, that Ed couldn't get John Gilly to come around and call after you. Ed says he'd never get him to steam up his nerve enough to call at a girl's house after her; but ain't it enough he's coming to Gert's to-night just to meet you? You ought to heard him when Ed got to telling him what kind of a girl you was. 'Gee!' Ed says he says. 'Big blue eyes like saucers sounds good to me! Well,' he says, Ed says he says, 'if my nerve don't lay down on me, I'll show up there with you.' That's something, ain't it, for a fellow like John Gilly to do just to meet a girl? Ain't it, Arch, for that fine, big fellow, Ed's foreman, you seen up at our house that night? You know the one I mean, the one with his arm scalded up from the explosion."

"Sure."

"Honest, if I wasn't already tagged and spoken for, I'd set my cap for him myself."

"'Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me!'" cried Mr. Sensenbrenner, with no great pertinence.

Miss Kinealy threw him a northwest glance. "Ain't he the cut-up, Stella?"

"He sure is."

"Br-a-a-y!" said Mr. Sensenbrenner, again none too relevantly.

"Oh, show her the way the zebra in the Park goes on Sunday morning, Arch!"

He inserted two fingers, splaying his mouth. "Heigh-ho! He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!"

"Ain't that lifelike, Stella?"

"It sure is."

"Oh, look! Up there--the third story--see--those are the Cobbs' windows, all lit up! Oh, gee! I just can't make my feet behave. Waltz me around again, Archie! No; you got to take the first dance with Stella."

"Oh no, Cora; he wants--"

"You hear, Arch?"

"Sure; only, I can't force her if she don't want to."

"Sure she wants to! Hurry! I hear Skinnay Flint's ukulele. Gee! I just can't make my feet be-have!"

They entered an institutional, sanitary, and legislation-smelling box of foyer and up three flights of fire-proof stairs. At each landing were four fire-proof doors, lettered. The Cobbs' door, "H," stood open, an epicene medley of voices and laughter floating down the long neck of hallway on the syncopated whine of a ukulele.

There was an immediate parting of ways, Mr. Sensenbrenner hanging his cap on an already well-filled rack of pegs and making straight for the sound of revelry by night.

The girls made foray into a little side pocket of bedroom for the changing of shoes, whitening of noses, and various curlicue preambles.

"Stella, your hair looks swell!"

"Ma plaited it up last night with sugar-water."

"Here, just this speck on your lips, just a little to match your cheeks!--See--all the girls use it."

"Ugh--no--"

"There, just a stroke. Fine! Say, wasn't Arch killing to-night when he called my cheeks naturally curly?"

"You look grand, Cora. Sure you don't want your pink beads?"

"I'll throw 'em down and step on 'em if you take 'em off."

"I just love that changeable silk on you."

"Does the split under the arm show?"

"Notta bit."

"Come on, then!"

"Oh, Cora--"

"Come on!"

In the Cobb front room a frightened exodus of furniture had taken place. A leather-and-oak "davenbed" had obviously and literally been dragged to the least conspicuous corner. An unpainted center of floor space showed that there had been a rug. Camp-chairs had been introduced against all available wall space. Only a fan-shaped, three-shelved cabinet of knickknacks had been allowed its corner. Diagonal from it, the horn of a talking-machine, in shape a large, a violent, a tin morning-glory, was directed full against the company.

Not a brilliant scene, except by grace or gracelessness of state of mind. But to Stella Schump, neither elected nor electing to walk in greater glory, there was that about the Cobb front room thus lighted, thus animated, that gave her a sense of function--a crowding around the heart. The neck of hallway might have been a strip of purple, awninged.

There were greetings that rose in crescendo and falsetto.

"Cora Kinealy! Hello, Cora! How's every little thing?" "Baby-shoes--tra-la-la!" "Oh, you changeable-silk kiddo! Turn green for the ladies." "Come on over here, Cora, and make Arch tell fortunes!"

"Gertie, this is my girl friend, Stella, from the shoes, I brought. Y'know? I told you about her. Ed's bringing down a gentleman friend for her."

Miss Gertie Cobb, so blond, so small, so titillating that she resembled nothing so much as one of those Dresden table-candelabra under a pink glass-fringed shade with the fringe always atinkle, laughed upward in a voice eons too old.

"Make yourself right at home. At our house, it's what you don't see ask for. Skin-nay Flint, if you don't stop! Make him quit, Cora; he's been ticklin' me something awful with that little old feather duster he brought along. Whatta you think this is--Coney Island? E-e-e-e-e-e!"

There ensued a scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to Mr. Flint's coattails.

"Leggo!"

"Quit--ouch--e-e-e-e-e! That's right; give it to him! Cora--go to it--e-e-e-e-e--"

Lips lifted to belie a sinkage of heart, Miss Schump, left standing, backed finally, sinking down to one of the camp-chairs against the wall. The little glittering mustache had come out again, and, sitting there, her smile so insistently lifted, the pink pearls at her throat rose and fell. The ukulele was whanging again, and a couple or two, locked cheek to cheek, were undulating in a low-lidded kind of ecstasy. Finally, Cora Kinealy and Archie Sensenbrenner, rather uglily oblivious.

A youth, frantic to outdistance a rival for the dancing-hand of Miss Gertie Cobb, stumbled across Miss Schump's carefully crossed ankles.

"'Scuse," he said, without glancing back.

"Certainly," said Miss Schump, through aching tonsils.

There was an encore, the raucous-throated morning-glory taking up where the ukulele had left off. Miss Schump sat on, the smile drawn more and more resolutely across her face. Occasionally, to indicate a state of social ease, she caught an enforced yawn with her hand.

After a while Mrs. Cobb entered, quietly, almost furtively, hands wrapped muff fashion in a checked apron, sitting down softly on the first of the camp-chairs near the door. She had the dough look of the comfortable and the uncorseted fat, her chin adding a scallop as, watching, her smile grew.

"It's great to watch the young ones," she said, finally.

Miss Schump moved gratefully, oh, so gratefully, two chairs over.

"It sure is," she said, assuming an attitude of conversation.

"Like I tell Gert, it makes me young again myself."

"It sure does."

"Give it to 'em in the house, I say, and it keeps 'em in off the street."

"Your daughter is sure one pretty girl."

"Gert's a good-enough girl, if I could keep her in. I tell 'er of all my young ones she's the prettiest and the sassiest. Law, how that girl can sass!"

"Like my mother always says to me about sass, sass never gets a girl nowheres."

"Indeed it don't! It's lost her more places than my other two, married now, ever lost put together. You work in the Criterion?"

"Yes'm. Children's shoes."

"I bet you're not the kind of a girl to change places every week."

"No'm. Criterion is the only place I ever worked at. I started there as Cash."

"I bet you give up at home out of your envelop."

"Yes'm."

"Father?"

"No'm. He was a night watchman and got shot on duty."

"Mother?"

"Yes'm."

"Brother?"

"No'm."

"Sister?"

"No'm."

"Only child, huh?"

"Yes'm."

Then Miss Cobb blew up in a state of breathless haste and bobbing of curls.

"Eats, maw--eats! The crowd's thirsty--spittin' cotton. What's the idea? My tongue's out. Eats! Quick, for Gawsakes--eats!"

Mrs. Cobb, wide and quivery of hip, retreated precipitately into the slit of hallway. Almost immediately there were refreshments, carried in on portentous black tin trays by a younger Cobb in pigtails and by Mrs. Cobb, swayback from a great outheld array of tumblers and bottles.

A shout went up.

The tray of sandwiches, piled to an apex, scarcely endured one round of passing. The fluted tin tops of bottles were pried off. Tumblers clicked. There were the sing of suds and foamy overflowings.

Enter Mr. Ed Kinealy, very brown and tight of suit, very black and pomaded of hair.

"Oh, Ed!" This from Miss Kinealy between large mouthfuls of sandwich and somewhat jerkily from being dandled on Mr. Sensenbrenner's knee, "Where's your friend--where's John Gilly?"

"Oh, Ed!" "Naouw, Eh-ud!" "I'll give you a slap on the wrist." "Naouw, Ed!" Delivered by those present in a chorus of catcalls and falsetto impersonations of Miss Kinealy in plaintive vein.

"Now tell me--where is he, Ed? Shut up every body! Where is he, Ed?"

Mr. Kinealy shot a pair of very striped cuffs.

"That guy had sense. One whiff of this roughhouse and he bolted down again, six steps at a jump. He slipped me so easy I was talking to myself all the way up-stairs. That guy had sense. Petticoat shush-shush can't put nothing over on him."

"Aw, Ed!"

CHORUS: Aw, Eh-ud! Aw, Eh-ud! Naouw--

"And him dated for Stella! Honest, it's a rotten shame!" Suddenly Miss Kinealy flashed to her feet, her glance running quick. "Where is she? Well, Stella Schump, sitting over there playing chums with yourself! Honest, your name ought to be Chump! Whatta you think that is--the amen corner? You're a fine bunch of social entertainers, you fellows are! Bring her up a chair. Gee! you are! Honest, Gertie Cobb, I wouldn't want my cat to be company to you! Bring 'er up a chair, Ed. Here, next to me! Honest, it's a rotten shame! Give 'er a sandwich. Open 'er up a bottle. Gee! you're a fine crowd of fish, you are!"

There was a general readjustment of circle and scraping of chairs. Miss Schump, scarlet, drew up and in, Mr. Kinealy prying off a fluted top for her.

"Have this one on me, Stella!" he cried. "Your guy bolted of stage fright; but I'm here, and don't you forget it!"

"Aw--tee-hee!" she said, wiping at her upper lip.

"Here!"

She regarded the foam sing down into amber quiet.

"I'm on the water-wagon," she said, essaying to be light of vein, crossing her hands and feet and tilting her glance at him.

"Say, here's a girl won't blow the foam off a fellow's glass for fear she'll get soapsuds in her eyes!"

"Wash her face with 'em!"

MISS KINEALY: Aw, now, Stella; can't you be a good fellow for once? Do it, if it hurts you. Honest, I hate to say it, but you're the limit, you are! My God! limber up a little--limber up!

"Here, now--open your mouth and shut your eyes."

"Open it for her, Ed."

"Aw, no; don't force her if she don't want it."

"Gowann, Stella; be human, if it hurts you."

Redly and somewhat painfully, the observed of all observers, Miss Schump tilted her head and drank, manfully and shudderingly, to the bitter end of the glass.

"Attaboy! Say, tell it to the poodles and the great Danes! That Jane's no amachure!"

Eyes stung to tears, pink tip of her tongue quickly circling her lips, Miss Schump held out to Mr. Kinealy the empty tumbler.

"Now, there!"

"More?"

"I'm game."

"Don't give 'er a whole glass, Ed."

She drank, again at one whiff.

"That's more like it! Didn't kill you, did it? Now eat that Swiss-cheese sandwich and come over next to me and Arch while he tells fortunes."

Miss Schump rose, rather high of head, the moment hers.

Miss Kinealy stretched her hand out into the center of the closing-in circle of heads.

"I said palm-reading, Arch, not hand-holding. Leave that part to Ed and Gert over there. Now quit squeezing--"

Mr. Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.

"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl--"I se-e a fellow about my size and complexion entering your life--"

To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.

"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure hot. Whew!"

"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is going along with you, and there's money coming--"

"Sure hot!" It was then Miss Schump, with fear of a rather growing and sickening sense of dizziness and of the wavy and unstable outline of things, slipped quietly and unobtrusively out into the hallway, her craving for air not to be gainsaid. The door to the little bedroom stood open, her pink scarf uppermost on the cot-edge. She stood for an instant in the doorway, regarding and wanting it, but quite as suddenly turned, and down the three flights gained the dewy quiet of out-of-doors, fighting muzziness.

The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of light-headedness took voice.

"Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!"

An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface of her.

The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again prone to easy laughter.