Chapter 8

Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, and maintained a smile that turned upward like the corners of a cycle moon. Remember, then, ascetic reader, that a rich man once kicked a leper; Kant's own heart, that it might turn the world's heart outward, burst of pain; and in the granite canyon of Wall Street, one smile in every three-score and ten turns upward.

Sadie Barnet met Max Meltzer's cycle-moon smile with the blazing eyes of scorn, and her lips, quivering to a smile, met in a straight line that almost ironed out the curves.

"'Cause you're stuck on me! That's a swell guess. Gee! you're as funny as a sob, you are."

The words scuttered from her lips like sharp hailstones and she glanced at him sidewise over a hump of uplifted shoulder and down the length of one akimbo arm.

"'Cause you're stuck on me! Huh!"

Max Meltzer leaned across a counter display of fringed breakfast napkins.

"Ain't that a good reason, Miss Sadie? It's a true one."

"You're one swell little guesser, you are _not_. You couldn't get inside a riddle with a can-opener. 'Cause you're stuck on me! Gee!"

"Well, I am."

"I didn't ask you why you was like a bottle of glue. I asked you why you was like a rubber band."

"Aw, I give up, Miss Sadie."

"'Cause you're so stretchy, see? 'Cause you're so stretchy you'll yawn your arm off if you don't watch it."

Max Meltzer collapsed in an attitude of mock prostration against a stock-shelf.

"Gee! that must have been cracked before the first nut."

"Smarty!"

Across the specially priced mill-ends she flashed the full line of her teeth, and with an intensity his features ill concealed he noted how sweet her throat as it arched.

"It's the spring fever gets inside of me and makes me so stretchy, Miss Sadie. It's a good thing trade is slow down here in the basement to-day, because it's the same with me every year; the Saturday before spring-opening week I just get to feeling like all outdoors."

"Wait till you see me with a new red-satin bow stuck on my last summer's shape. Dee Dee's got to lend me the price for two yards of three-inch red-satin ribbon for my spring opening."

His breath rose in his throat.

"I bet you look swell in red, Miss Sadie. But a girl like you looks swell in anything."

"Red's my color. Dee Dee says my mamma was a gay one, too, when it came to color. Had to have a red bow pinned somewheres around all the months she was in bed and--and up to the very night she died. Gimme red every time. Dee Dee's the one that's always kicking against red; she says I got too flashy taste."

"Say, if she keeps bossing and bossing at you, what do you keep on living with her for?"

"Wouldn't you live with your own mother's sister if she raised you from a kid? What am I going to do, put her in cold storage, now that her eyes are going back on her? Up in the ribbons she can't hardly keep her colors graduated no more, that's how blind she's getting. Only yesterday a dame brought back some lavender ribbon and wiped up the whole department with Dee Dee for putting it over on her as blue. What am I going to do?"

"Honest, Miss Sadie, I didn't know that she was your aunt and that her eyes was bad. I've seen you two together a lot and noticed her thick lenses, but I just didn't think."

"Well, now I'm telling you."

"I just thought she was some old girl up in the ribbons you was living with for company. Honest, I didn't know she had bad eyes. Gee!"

"No, they ain't bad. Only she's so blind she reads her paper upside down and gets sore if you tell her about it."

"And me thinking she was nothing but a near-sighted old grouch with a name like a sparrow."

Miss Barnet laughed with an upward trill.

"Dee Dee ain't her real name. When I was a kid and she took me to raise, that's the way I used to pronounce Aunt Edith. Gee! you don't think Dee Dee was the name they sprinkled on her when they christened her, did you?"

Max Meltzer leaned to the breath of her laughter as if he would fill his lungs with it.

"Gee! but you're a cute little lady when you laugh like that."

"Say, and ain't you the freshie! Just because you're going to be promoted to buyer for your department won't get your picture in the Sunday supplement. No white-goods buyer I know of ever had to build white marble libraries or present a bread-line to the city to get rid of his pin-money."

"I bet you was a cute little black-eyed, red-cheeked little youngster, alrighty."

"I wasn't so worse. Like I tell Dee Dee, the way she's held me down and indoors evenings, it's a wonder a kid like me grew up with any pep at all."

"Poor little lady!"

"It's like Dee Dee says, though. I never was cut out for life behind the counter. Gee! I'd soak my pillow in gasolene every night in the week if it would make me dream I'm automobiling."

"Poor little lady!"

"Say, ain't it hot? With the Opening on Monday, they better get the fans working. Last year three girls keeled. Honest, sometimes I think I'd rather spend the summer under the daisies out on the hill than down here in this basement."

"Don't I wish I had an auto to take you spinning in to-night."

"You ought to see the flier a friend of mine has got. A Mercury Six with a limousine top like a grand-opera box."

"Your--your--friend?"

"Yes. He's that slick-looking, little fat fellow that's a cousin to Mamie Grant up in the ready-to-wears. He was down here talking to me the other day."

"I seen him."

"Gee! you ought to feel yourself in his Mercury Six. 'Lemme die,' I says to him the last time I was in it. 'Just lemme close my eyes right in here and die happy,' I says, cuddled up in the red-leather seat with a cornucopia of daffodils tickling my nose and a street-car full of strap-hangers riding along-side of us."

"I--I guess if you got swell friends like that, a boat excursion down the river 'ain't got much of a sound for you."

"He says he's got a launch in summer--"

"Honest, Miss Sadie, I--I just been trying for the better part of two weeks to ask permission if I could come and call on you some evening, Miss Sadie, but--"

"Whoops! ain't he the daredevil!"

"The first boat of the season, Miss Sadie, a swell new one they call the _White Gull_, goes down to Coney to-night, and, it being real springtime, and you feeling kind of full of it, I thought maybe, it being the first boat of the season, maybe you would take a river ride this grand April night, Miss Sadie."

Her glance slanted toward him, full of quirks.

"My aunt Dee Dee, Mr. Meltzer, she's right strict with me. She don't think I ought to keep company with any boys that don't come to see me first at my house."

"I know it, Miss Sadie; that's the right way to do it, but I think I can get around her all right. Wasn't she down here in the basement the day I first heard about my promotion, and didn't she give me the glad hand and seem right friendly to me? I can get around her all right, Miss Sadie. I can always tell if a person likes me or not."

"Anyways, if her eyes ain't too bad, Mr. Meltzer, I got a date with my friend if his car is out of the shop from having the limousine top taken off. We--we're going for a little spin."

A quick red belied her insouciance and she made a little foray into the bin of mill-ends.

"Gee! if I've made three sales this livelong day I don't know nothing about two of them."

Max Meltzer met her dancing gaze, pinioning it with his own quiet eyes.

"You're right to pick out the lucky fellows who can buy a good time. A little girl like you ought to have every enjoyment there is. If I could give it to you, do you think I would let the other fellows beat me to it? The best ain't none too good for a little lady like you."

"Aw, Mr. Meltzer!" Her bosom filled and waned. "Aw, Mr. Meltzer!"

"I mean it."

An electric bell grilled through his words. Miss Barnet sprang reflexly from the harness of an eight-hour day.

"Aw, looka, and I wanted to sneak up before closing and get Dee Dee to snip me two yards of red satin, and she won't cut an inch after the bell. Ain't that luck for you? Ain't that luck?"

Her lips drew to a pout.

"Lemme get it for you, Miss Sadie. I know a girl up in the ribbons--"

"No, no, Mr. Meltzer. I--I got to charge it to Dee Dee, and, anyways, she gets mad like anything if I keep her waiting. I gotta go. 'Night, Mr. Meltzer! 'Night!"

She was off through the maze of the emptying store, in the very act of pinning on her little hat with its jaunty imitation fur pompon, and he breathed in as she passed, as if of the perfume of her personality.

At the ribbon counter on the main floor the last of a streamlet of outgoing women detached herself from the file as Miss Barnet ascended the staircase.

"Hurry up, Sadie."

"Dee Dee! How'd you girls up here get on your duds so soon? I thought maybe if I'd hurry upstairs you--you'd find time to cut me a two-yard piece of three-inch red satin for my hat, Dee Dee--to-morrow being Sunday. Two yards, Dee Dee, and that'll make two-sixty-nine I owe you. Aw, Dee Dee, it won't take a minute, to-morrow Sunday and all! Aw, Dee Dee!"

Miss Barnet slid ingratiating fingers into the curve of the older woman's arm; her voice was smooth as salve.

"Aw, Dee Dee, who ever heard of wearing fur on a hat in April? I gotta stick a red bow on my last summer's sailor, Dee Dee."

Miss Edith Worte stiffened so that the muscles sprang out in the crook of her arm and the cords in her long, yellowing neck. Years had dried on her face, leaving ravages, and through her high-power spectacles her pale eyes might have been staring through film and straining to see.

"Please, Dee Dee!"

Miss Barnet held backward, a little singsong note of appeal running through her voice.

Miss Worte jerked forward toward the open door. April dusk, the color of cold dish-water, showed through it. Dusk in the city comes sadly, crowding into narrow streets and riddled with an immediate quick-shot of electric bulbs.

"'Ain't you got no sense a-tall? 'Ain't you got no sense in that curly head of yourn but ruination notions?"

"Aw, Dee Dee!"

They were in the flood tide which bursts through the dam at six o'clock like a human torrent flooding the streets, then spreading, thinning, and finally seeping into homes, hall bedrooms, and Harlem flats.

Miss Edith Worte turned her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around her thin legs.

"Watch out, Dee Dee! Step down; there's a curb."

"I don't need you. It's lots you care if I go blind on the spot."

"Dee Dee!"

"God! if I didn't have nothing to worry me but red ribbons! I told the doctor to-day while he was putting the drops in my eyes, that if he'd let me go blind I--I--"

"Now, now, Dee Dee! Ain't you seeing better these last few days?"

"If you had heard what the doctor told me to-day when he put the drops in my eyes you'd have something to think about besides red ribbon, alrighty."

"I forgot, Dee Dee, to-day was your eye-doctor day. He's always scarin' you up. Just don't pay no attention. I forgot it was your day."

"Sure you forgot. But you won't forget if I wake up alone in the dark some day."

"Dee Dee!"

"You won't forget then. You won't forget to nag me even then for duds to go automobiling with fly men that can't bring you no good."

"Dee Dee, I 'ain't been but one night this week. I been saving up all my nights for--for to-night."

"To-night. Say, I can't keep you from going to the devil on skates if--"

"It's only the second time this week, Dee Dee, and I--I promised. He'll have the limousine top off to-night--and feel, it is just like summer. A girl's gotta have a little something once in a while."

"What do I gotta have? What do I gotta have but slave and work?"

"It's different with you, Dee Dee. You're older even than my mamma was, and didn't you say when you and her was girls together there wasn't a livelier two sisters? Now didn't you, Dee Dee?"

"In a respectable way, yes. But there wasn't the oily-mouthed, bald-headed divorced man alive, with little rat eyes and ugly lips, who could have took me or your mamma out auto-riding before or after dark. We was working-girls, too, but there wasn't a man didn't take off his hat to us, even if he was bald-headed and it was twenty below zero."

"Aw!"

"Yes, 'aw'! You keep running around with the kind of men that don't look at a girl unless she's served up with rum-sauce and see where it lands you. Just keep running if you want to, but my money don't buy you no red ribbons to help to drive you to the devil!"

"The way you keep fussing at me, when I don't even go to dances like the other girls! I--sometimes I just wish I was dead. The way I got to watch the clock like it was a taximeter the whole time I'm out anywheres. It's the limit. Even Max Meltzer gimme the laugh to-day."

"You'd never hear me say watch the clock if you'd keep company with a boy like Max Meltzer. A straight, clean boy with honest intentions by a girl lookin' right out of his face. You let a boy like Max Meltzer begin to keep steady with you and see what I say. You don't see no yellow streak in his face; he's as white as the goods he sells."

"I know. I know. You think now because he's going to be made buyer for the white goods in September he's the whole show. Gee! nowadays that ain't so muchy much for a fellow to be."

"No, I think the kind of fellows that fresh Mamie Grant gets you acquainted with are muchy much. I'm strong for the old rat-eyed sports like Jerry Beck, that 'ain't got a honest thought in his head. I bet he gives you the creeps, too, only you're the kind of a girl, God help you, that's so crazy for luxury you could forget the devil had horns if he hid 'em under a automobile cap."

"Sure I am. I 'ain't seen nothing but slaving and drudging and pinching all my life, while other girls are strutting the Avenue in their furs and sleeping mornings as long as they want under eider-down quilts. Sure, when a man like Jerry Beck comes along with a carriage-check instead of a Subway-ticket I can thaw up to him like a water-ice, and I ain't ashamed of it, neither."

They turned into a narrow aisle of street lined with unbroken rows of steep, narrow-faced houses. Miss Worte withdrew her arm sharply and plunged ahead, her lips wry and on the verge of tremoling.

"When a girl gets twenty, like you, it ain't none of my put-in no more. Only I hope to God your mother up there is witness that if ever a woman slaved to keep a girl straight and done her duty by her it was me. That man 'ain't got no good intentions by--"

"Oh, ain't you--ain't you a mean-thinking thing, ain't you? What kind of a girl do you think I am? If he didn't have the right intentions by me do you think--"

"Oh, I guess he'll marry you if he can't get you no other way. Them kind always do if they can't help themselves. A divorced old guy like him, with a couple of kids and his mean little eyes, knows he's got to pay up if he wants a young girl like you. Oh, I--Ouch--oh--oh!"

"Dee Dee, take my arm. That was only an ashcan you bumped into. It's the drops he puts in your eyes makes 'em so bad to-night, I guess. Go on, take my arm, Dee Dee. Here we are home. Lemme lead you up-stairs. It's nothing but the drops, Dee Dee."

They turned in and up and through a foggy length of long hallway. Spring had not entered here. At the top of a second flight of stairs a slavey sat back on her heels and twisted a dribble of gray water from her cloth into her bucket. At the last and third landing an empty coal-scuttle stood just outside a door as if nosing for entrance.

"Watch out, Dee Dee, the scuttle. Lemme go in first. Gee! it's cold indoors and warm out, ain't it? Wait till I light up. There!"

"Lemme alone. I can see."

An immemorial federation of landladies has combined against Hestia to preserve the musty traditions of the furnished room. Love in a cottage is fostered by subdivision promoters and practised by commuters on a five-hundred-dollars-down, monthly-payment basis. Marble halls have been celebrated in song, but the furnished room we have with us always at three cents per agate line.

You with your feet on your library fender, stupefied with contentment and your soles scorching, your heart is not black; it is only fat. How can it know the lean formality of the furnished room? Your little stenographer, who must wear a smile and fluted collars on eight dollars a week, knows it; the book agent at your door, who earns eighteen cents on each Life of Lincoln, knows it. Chambermaids know it when they knock thrice and only the faint and nauseous fumes of escaping gas answer them through the plugged keyhole. Coroners know it.

Sadie Barnet and Edith Worte knew it, too, and put out a hand here and there to allay it. A comforting spread of gay chintz covered the sag in their white iron bed; a photograph or two stuck upright between the dresser mirror and its frame, and tacked full flare against the wall was a Japanese fan, autographed many times over with the gay personnel of the Titanic Store's annual picnic.

"Gee! Dee Dee, six-twenty already! I got to hurry. Unhook me while I sew in this ruching."

"Going for supper?"

"Yeh. He invited me. This is cottage-pudding night; tell old lady Finch when I ain't home for supper you got two desserts coming to you."

"I don't want no supper."

"Aw, now, Dee Dee!"

Miss Worte dropped her dark cape from her shoulders, hung it with her hat on a door peg, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed.

"God! my feet!"

"Soak 'em."

Miss Barnet peeled off her shirt-waist. Her bosom, strong and _flat_ as a boy's, rose white from her cheaply dainty under-bodice; at her shoulders the flesh began to deepen, and her arms were round and full of curves.

"Here, Dee Dee, I'm so nervous when I hurry. You sew in this ruche; you got time before the supper-bell. See, right along the edge like that."

Miss Worte aimed for the eye of the needle, moistening the end of the thread with her tongue and her fluttering fingers close to her eyes.

"God! I--I just 'ain't got the eyes no more. I can't see, Sadie; I can't find the needle."

Sadie Barnet paused in the act of brushing out the cloud of her dark hair, and with a strong young gesture ran the thread through the needle, knotting its end with a quirk of thumb and forefinger.

"It's the drops, Dee Dee, and this gaslight, all blurry from the curling-iron in the flame, makes you see bad."

Miss Worte nodded and closed her eyes as if she would press back the tears and let them drip inward.

"Yeh, I know. I know."

"Sure! Here, lemme do it, Dee Dee. I won't stay out late, dearie, if your eyes are bad. We're only going out for a little spin."

Miss Worte lay back on the chintz bedspread and turned her face to the wall.

"I should worry if you come home or if you don't--all the comfort you are to me."

"You say that to me many more times and you watch and see what I do; you watch and see."

"The sooner the better."

In the act of fluting the soft ruche about her neck, so that her fresh little face rose like a bud from its calyx, Miss Barnet turned to the full length of back which faced her from the bed.

"That's just the way I feel about it--the sooner the better."

"Then we think alike."

"You 'ain't been such a holy saint to me that I got to pay up to you for it all my life."

"That's the thanks I get."

"You only raised me because you had to. I been working for my own living ever since I was so little I had to He to the inspectors about my age."

"Except what you begged out of my wages."

"I been as much to you as you been to me and--and I don't have to stand this no longer. Sure I can get out and--and the sooner the better. I'm sick of getting down on my knees to you every time I wanna squeeze a little good time out of life. I'm tired paying up for the few dollars you gimme out of your envelop. If I had any sense I--I wouldn't never take it from you, nohow, the way you throw it up to me all the time. The sooner the better is what I say, too; the sooner the better."

"That's the thanks I get; that's the--"

"Aw, I know all that line of talk by heart, so you don't need to ram it down me. You gotta quit insinuating about my ways to me. I'm as straight as you are and--"

"You--you--take off that ivory-hand breast-pin; that ain't yours."

"Sure I'll take it off, and this ruche you gimme the money to buy, and this red bracelet you gimme, and--and every old thing you ever gimme. Sure I'll take 'em all off. I wish I could take off these gray-top shoes you paid a dollar toward, and I would, too, if I didn't have to go barefoot. It's the last time I borrow from--"

"Aw, you commenced that line of talk when you was ten."

"I mean it."

"Well, if you do, take off them gloves that I bought for myself and you begged right off my hands. Just take 'em off and go barehanded with your little-headed friend; maybe he can buy--"

"You--Oh, I--I wish I was dead! I--I'll go barehanded to a snowball feast rather than wear your duds. There's your old gloves--there!"

Tears were streaming and leaving their ravages on the smooth surface of her cheeks.

"I just wish I--I was dead."

"Aw, no, you don't! There's him now, with a horn on his auto that makes a noise like the devil yelling! There's your little rat-eyed, low-lived fellow, now. You don't wish you was dead now, do you? Go to him and his two divorces and his little roundhead. That's where you belong; that's where girls on the road to the devil belong--with them kind. There he is now, waiting to ride you to the devil. He don't need to honk-honk so loud; he knows you're ready and waiting for him."

Miss Barnet fastened on her little hat with fingers that fumbled.

"Gimme--the key."

"Aw, no, you don't. When you come home tonight you knock; no more tiptoe, night-key business like last time. I knew you was lying to me about the clock."

"You gimme that key. I don't want you to have to get up, with all your kicking, to open the door for me. You gimme the key."

"If you wanna get in this room when you come home to-night, you knock like any self-respecting girl ain't afraid to do."

"You--oh--you!" With a shivering intake of breath Miss Barnet flung wide the door, slamming it after her until the windows and the blue-glass vase on the mantelpiece and Miss Worte, stretched full length on the bed, shivered.

Two flights down she flung open the front door. There came from the curb the bleat of a siren, wild for speed.

Stars had come out, a fine powdering of them, and the moist evening atmosphere was sweet, even heavy. She stood for a moment in the embrasure of the door, scenting.

"Do I need my heavy coat, Jerry?"

The dim figure in the tonneau, with his arms flung out their length across the back of the seat, moved from the center to the side.

"No, you don't. Hurry up! I'll keep you warm if you need a coat. Climb in here right next to me, Peachy. Gimme that robe from the front there, George.

"Now didn't I say I was going to keep you warm? Quit your squirming, Touchy. I won't bite. Ready, George. Up to the Palisade Inn, and let out some miles there."

"Gee! Jerry, you got the limousine top off. Ain't this swell for summer?"

Mr. Jerome Beck settled back in the roomy embrasure of the seat and exhaled loudly, his shoulder and shoe touching hers.

She settled herself out of their range.

"Now, now, snuggle up a little, Peachy."

She shifted back to her first position.

"That's better."

"Ain't it a swell night?"

"Now we're comfy--eh?"