Part 5

Romance has more lives than a cat. Crushed to earth beneath the double-tube, non-skiddable tires of a sixty-horse-power limousine, she allows her prancing steed to die in the dust of yesterday and elopes with the chauffeur.

Love has transferred his activities from the garden to the electric-heated taxi-cab and suffers fewer colds in the head. No, romance is not dead--only reincarnated; she rode away in divided skirt and side-saddle, and motored back in goggles. The tree-bark messages of the lovers of Arden are the fifty-word night letters of to-day.

The first editions of the Iliad were writ in the tenderest flesh parts of men's hearts, and truly enough did Moses blast his sublime messages out of the marble of all time; but why bury romance with the typewriter as a headstone?

Why, indeed--when up in the ninth-floor offices of A. L. Gregory, stenographers and expert typewriters--Miss Goldie Flint, with hair the color of heat-lightning, and wrists that jangled to the rolled-gold music of three bracelets, could tick-tack a hundred-word-a-minute love scene that was destined, after her neat carbon copies were distributed, to wring tears, laughter, and two dollars each from a tired-business-man audience.

Why, indeed, when the same slow fires that burned in Giaconda's upslanted eyes and made the world her lover lay deep in Goldie's own and invariably won her a seat in the six-o'clock Subway rush, and a bold, bad, flirtatious stare if she ventured to look above the third button of a man's coat.

Goldie Flint, beneath whose too-openwork shirt-waist fluttered a heart the tempo of which was love of life--and love of life on eight dollars a week and ninety per cent. impure food, and a hall-room, more specifically a standing room, is like a pink rose-bush that grows in a slack heap and begs its warmth from ashes.

Goldie, however, up in her ninth-floor offices, and bent to an angle of forty-five degrees over the denouement of white-slave drama that promised a standing-room-only run and the free advertising of censorship, had little time or concern for her various atrophies.

It was nearly six o'clock, and she wanted half a yard of pink tulle before the shops closed. Besides, hers were the problems of the six-million-dollar incorporateds, who hire girls for six dollars a week; for the small-eyed, large-diamoned birds of prey who haunt the glove-counters and lace departments of the six-million-dollar incorporateds with invitations to dinner; and for the night courts, which are struggling to stanch the open gap of the social wound with medicated gauze instead of a tight tourniquet.

A yard of pink tulle cut to advantage would make a fresh yoke that would brighten even a three-year-old, gasolene-cleaned blouse. Harry Trimp liked pink tulle. Most Harry Trimps do.

At twenty minutes before six the lead-colored dusk of January crowded into the Gregory typewriting office so thick that the two figures before the two typewriters faded into the veil of gloom like a Corot landscape faints into its own mist.

Miss Flint ripped the final sheet of her second act from the roll of her machine, reached out a dim arm that was noisy with bracelets, and clicked on the lights. The two figures at the typewriters, the stationary wash-stand in the corner, a roll-top desk, and the heat-lightning tints in Miss Flint's hair sprang out in the jaundiced low candle-power.

"I'm done the second act, Miss Gregory. May I go now?"

Miss Flint's eyes were shining with the love-of-life lamps, the mica powder of romance, and a brilliant anticipation of Harry Trimp. Miss Gregory's were twenty years older and dulled like glass when you breathed on it.

"Yes; if you got to go I guess you can."

"Ain't it a swell play, Miss Gregory? Ain't it grand where he pushes her to the edge of the bridge and she throws herself down and hugs his knees?"

"Did you red ink your stage directions in, with the margin wide, like he wants? He was fussy about the first act."

"Yes'm; and say, ain't it a swell name for a show--'The Last of the Dee-Moolans'? Give me a show to do every time, and you can have all your contracts and statements and multigraph letters. Those love stories that long, narrow fellow brings in are swell to do, too, if he wa'n't such an old grouch about punctuation. Give me stuff that has some reading in it every time!"

Miss Gregory sniffed--the realistic, acidulated sniff of unloved forty and a thin nose.

"The sooner you quit curlin' your side-hair and begin to learn that life's made up of statements and multigraphs, instead of love scenes on papier-mache bridges and flashy fellows in checked suits and get-rich-quick schemes, the better off you're going to be."

The light in Goldie's face died out as suddenly as a Jack-o'-lantern when you blow on the taper.

"Aw, Miss Greg-or-ee!" Her voice was the downscale wail of an oboe. "Whatta you always picking on Harry Trimp for? He ain't ever done anything to you--and you said yourself when he brought them circular letters in that he was one handsome kid."

"Just the same, I knew when he came in here the second time hanging round you with them blue eyes and black lashes, and that batch of get-rich-quick letters, he was as phony as his scarf-pin."

"I glory in a fellow's spunk that can give up a clerking job and strike out for hisself--that's what I do!"

"He was fired--that's how he started out for himself. Ask Mae Pope; she knows a thing or two about him."

"Aw, Miss--"

"Wait until you have been dealing with them as long as I have! Once get a line on a man's correspondence, and you can see through him as easy as through a looking-glass with the mercury rubbed off."

The walls of Jericho fell at the blast of a ram's horn. Not so Miss Flint's frailer fortifications.

"The minute a fellow that doesn't belong to the society of pikers and gets a three-figure salary comes along, and can take a girl to a restaurant where they begin with horse-doovries instead of wiping your cutlery on the table-cloth and deciding whether you want the 'and' with your ham fried or scrambled--the minute a fellow like that comes along and learns one of us girls that taxi-cabs was made for something besides dodging, and pink roses for something besides florist windows--that minute they put on another white-slave play, and your friends begin to recite the doxology to music. Gee! It's fierce!"

"Gimme that second act, Goldie. Thank Gawd I can say that in all my years of experience I've never been made a fool of: and, if I do say it, I had chances in my time!"

"You--you're the safest girl I know, Miss Gregory."

"What?"

"You're safe if you know the ropes, Miss Gregory."

"What did you do with the Rheinhardt statement, Goldie? He'll be in for it any minute."

"It's in your left-hand drawer, along with those contracts, Miss Gregory. I made two carbons."

Miss Flint slid into her pressed-plush fourteen-dollar-and-a-half copy of a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat, pulled her curls out from under the brim of her tight hat, and clasped a dyed-rat tippet about her neck so that her face flowered above it like a small rose out of its calyx.

The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, the Fifth Dimension, and the American Shopgirl and How She Does Not Look It on Six Dollars a Week, and Milk-Chocolate Lunches are still the subjects that are flung like serpentine confetti across the pink candle-shades of four-fork dinners, and are wound like red tape round Uplift Societies and Ladies' Culture Clubs.

Yet Goldie flourished on milk-chocolate lunches like the baby-food infants on the backs of magazines flourish on an add-hot-water-and-serve, twenty-five-cents-a-can substitute for motherhood.

"Good night, Miss Gregory."

"Night!"

Goldie closed the door softly behind her as though tiptoeing away from the buzzing gnats of an eight-hour day. Simultaneously across the hall the ground-glass door of the Underwriters' Realty Company swung open with a gust, and Mr. Eddie Bopp, clerk, celibate, and aspirant for the beyond of each state, bowed himself directly in Goldie's path.

"Ed-die! Ain't you early to-night, though! Since when are you keeping board-of-directors hours?"

"I been watching for you, Goldie."

Eddie needs no introduction. He solicits coffee orders at your door. The shipping-clerks and dustless-broom agents and lottery-ticket buyers of the world are made of his stuff. Bronx apartment houses, with perambulators and imitation marble columns in the down-stairs foyer, are built for his destiny. He sells you a yard of silk; he travels to Coney Island on hot Sunday afternoons; he bleaches on the bleachers; he bookkeeps; he belongs to a building association and wears polka-dot neckties. He is not above the pink evening edition. Ibsen and eugenics and post impressionism have never darkened the door of his consciousness. He is the safe-and-sane strata in the social mountain; not of the base or of the rarefied heights that carry dizziness.

Yet when Eddie regarded Goldie there was that in his eyes which transported him far above the safe-and-sane strata to the only communal ground that men and socialists admit--the Arcadia of lovers.

"I wasn't going to let you get by me to-night, Goldie. I ain't walked home with you for so long I haven't a rag of an excuse left to give Addie."

Miss Flint colored the faint pink of dawn's first moment.

"I--I got to do some shopping to-night, Eddie. That's why I quit early. Believe me, Gregory'll make me pay up to-morrow."

"It won't be the first time I shopped with you, Goldie."

"No."

"Remember the time we went down in Tracy's basement for a little alcohol-stove you wanted for your breakfasts? The girl at the counter thought we--we were spliced."

"Yeh!" Miss Flint's voice was faint as the thud of a nut to the ground.

They shot down fifteen fireproof stories in a breath-taking elevator, and then out on the whitest, brightest Broadway in the world, where the dreary trilogy of Wine, Woman, and Song is played from noon to dawn, with woman the cheapest of the three.

"How's Addie?"

"She don't complain, but she gets whiter and whiter--poor kid! I got her some new crutches, Goldie--swell mahogany ones with silver tips. You ought to see her get round on them!"

"I--I been so busy--night-work and--and--"

"She's been asking about you every night, Goldie. It ain't like you to stay away like this."

Their breaths clouded before them in the stinging air, and down the length of the enchanted highway lights sprang out of the gloom and winked at them like naughty eyes.

"What's the matter, Goldie? You ain't mad at me--us--are you?"

Eddie took her pressed-plush elbow in the cup of his hand and looked down at her, trying in vain to capture the bright flame of her glance.

"Nothing's the matter, Eddie. Why should I be mad? I been busy--that's all."

The tide of home-going New York caught them in its six-o'clock vortex. Shops emptied and street-cars filled. A newsboy fell beneath a car, and Broadway parted like a Red Sea for an overworked ambulance, the mission of which was futile. A lady in a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat and a notorious dog-collar of pearls stepped out of a wine-colored limousine into the gold-leaf foyer of a hotel. A ten-story emporium ran an iron grating across its entrance, and ten watchmen reported for night duty.

"Aw, gee! They're closed! Ain't that the limit now! Ain't that the limit! I wanted some pink tulle."

"Poor kid! Don't you care! You can get it tomorrow--you can work Gregory."

"I--I wanted it for tonight."

"What?"

"I wanted it for my yoke."

They turned into the dark aisle of a side street; the wind lurked around the corner to leap at them.

"Oh-h-h-h!"

He held tight to her arm.

"It's some night--ain't it, girlie?"

"I should say so!"

"Poor little kid!"

Eddie's voice was suddenly the lover's, full of that quality which is like unto the ting of a silver bell after the clapper is quiet.

"You're coming home to a good hot supper with me, Goldie--ain't you, Goldie? Addie'll like it."

She withdrew her hand from the curve of his elbow.

"I can't, Eddie--not tonight. I--tell her I'm coming over real soon."

"Oh!"

"It's sure cold, ain't it?"

"Goldie, can't you tell a fellow what's the matter? Can't you tell me why you been dodging me--us--for two weeks? Can't you tell a fellow--huh, Goldie?"

"Geewhillikins, Eddie! Ain't I told you it's nothing? There ain't a girl could be a better friend to Addie than me."

"I know that, Goldie; but--"

"Didn't we work in the same office thick as peas for two whole years before her--accident--even before I knew she had a brother? Ain't I stuck to her right through--ain't I?"

"You know that ain't what I mean, Goldie. You been a swell friend to poor Addie, stayin' with her Sundays when you could be havin' a swell time and all; but it's me I'm talking about, Goldie. Sometimes--sometimes I--"

"Aw!"

"I've never talked straight out about it before, Goldie; but you--you remember the night--the night I rigged up like a Christmas tree, and you said I was all the ice-cream in my white pants--the night Addie was run over and they sent for me?"

"Will I ever forget it!"

"I was tuning up that evening to tell you, Goldie--while we were sitting there on your stoop, with the street-light in our eyes, and you screechin' every time a June-bug bumbled in your face!"

"Gawd, how I hate bugs! There was one in Miss Gregory's--"

"I was going to tell you that night, Goldie, that there was only one girl--one girl for me--and--"

"Yeh; and while we were sittin' there gigglin' and screechin' at June-bugs poor Addie was provin' that a street-car fender has got it all over a mangling-machine."

"Yes; it's like she says about herself--she was payin' her initiation fee for life membership into the Society of Cripples with a perfectly good hip and a bit of spine."

"Poor Addie! Gawd, how she loved to dance! She used to spend every noon-hour eatin' marshmallows and learning me new steps."

The wind soughed in their ears, and Goldie's skirts blew backward like sails.

"You haven't got a better friend than Addie right now, girlie! She always says our little flat is yours. The three of us, Goldie--the three of us could--"

"It's swell for a girl that ain't got none of her own blood to have a friend like that. Swell, lemme tell you!"

"Goldie!"

"Yes."

"It's like I said--I've never talked right out before, but I got a feelin' you're slippin' away from me like a eel, girlie. You know--aw, you know I ain't much on the elocution stuff; but if it wasn't for Addie and her accident right now--I'd ask you outright--I would. You know what I mean!"

"I don't know anything, Eddie; I'm no mind-reader!"

"Aw, cut it out, Goldie! You know I'm tied up right now and can't say some of the things I was going to say that night on the stoop. You know what I mean--with Addie's doctor's bills and chair and crutches, and all."

"Sure I do, Eddie. You've got no right to think of anything."

She turned from him so that her profile was like a white cameo mounted on black velvet.

"You just give me a little time, Goldie, and I'll be on my feet, all righty. I just want some kind of understanding between us--that's all."

"Oh--you--I--"

"I got Joe's job cinched if he goes over to the other firm in March; and by that time, Goldie, you and me and Addie, on eighty per, could--why, we--"

She swayed back from his close glance and ran up the first three steps of her rooming-house. Her face was struck with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky.

"'Sh-h-h-h-h-h!" she said. "You mustn't!"

He reached for her hand, caught it and held it--but like a man who feels the rope sliding through his fingers and sees his schooner slipping out to sea--slipping out to sea.

"Lemme go, Eddie! I gotta go--it's late!"

"I _know_, Goldie. They been guyin' me at the office about you passin' me up; and it's right--ain't it? It's--It's him--" She shook her head and tugged for the freedom of her hand. Tears crowded into her eyes like water to the surface of a tumbler just before the overflow. "It's _him_--ain't it, Goldie?"

"Well, you won't give--give a girl a chance to say anything. If you'd have given me time I was comin' over and tell you, and--and tell--"

"Goldie!"

"I was--I was--"

"It's none of my business, girlie; but--but he ain't fit for you. He--"

"There you go! The whole crowd of you make me--"

"He ain't fit for no girl, Goldie! Listen to me, girlie! He's just a regular ladykiller! He can't keep a job no more'n a week for the life of him! I used to know him when I worked at Delaney's. Listen to me, Goldie! This here new minin' scheme he's in ain't even on the level! It ain't none of my business; but, good God, Goldie, just because a guy's good-lookin' and a swell dresser and--"

She sprang from his grasp and up the three remaining steps. In the sooty flare of the street lamp she was like Jeanne d'Arc heeding the vision or a suffragette declaiming on a soap-box and equal rights.

"You--the whole crowd of you make me sick! The minute a fellow graduates out of the sixty-dollar-clerk class, and can afford a twenty-dollar suit, without an extra pair of pants thrown in, the whole pack of you begin to yowl and yap at his heels like--"

"Goldie! Goldie, listen--"

"Yes, you do! But I ain't caring. I know him, and I know what I want. We're goin' to get married when we're good and ready, and we ain't apologizing to no one! I don't care what the whole pack of you have to say, except Addie and you; and--and--I--oh--"

Goldie turned and fled into the house, slamming the front door after her so that the stained-glass panels rattled--then up four flights, with the breath soughing in her throat and the fever of agitation racing through her veins.

Her oblong box of a room at the top of the long flights was cold with a cavern damp and musty with the must that is as indigenous to rooming-houses as chorus-girls to the English peerage or insomnia to black coffee.

Even before she lighted her short-armed gas-jet, however, a sweet, insidious, hothouse fragrance greeted her faintly through the must, as the memory of mignonette clings to old lace. Goldie's face softened as if a choir invisible was singing her ragtime from above her skylight. She lighted her fan of gas with fingers that trembled in a pleasant frenzy of anticipation, and the tears dried on her face and left little paths down her cheeks.

A fan of pink roses, fretted with maidenhair fern and caught with a sash of pink tulle, lay on her coarse cot coverlet, as though one of her dreams had ventured out of its long night.

What a witch is love!

Pink leaped into Goldie's cheeks, and into her eyes the light that passeth understanding. Life dropped its dun-colored cloak and stood suddenly garlanded in pink, wire-stemmed roses.

She buried her face in their fragrance. She kissed a cool bud, the heart of which was closed. She unwrapped the pink tulle sash with fingers that were addled--like a child's at the gold cord of a candy-box--and held the filmy streamer against her bosom in the outline of a yoke.

* * * * *

In Mrs. McCasky's boarding-house the onward march of night was as regular as a Swiss watch with an American movement.

At nine o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated along the hall wall, down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through the knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.

At ten o'clock the Polinis, on the third-floor back, let down their folding-bed and shivered the chandelier in Major Florida's second-floor back.

At eleven o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated unevenly along the hall wall, down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through the knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.

At twelve o'clock the electric piano in Joe's place ceased to clatter through the night like coal pouring into an empty steel bin, and Mrs. McCasky lowered the hall light from a blob the size of a cranberry to a French pea.

At one o'clock the next to the youngest Polini infant lifted its voice to the skylight, and Mr. Trimp's night-key waltzed round the front-door lock, scratch-scratching for its hole.

In the dim-lit first-floor front Mrs. Trimp started from her light doze like a deer in a park, which vibrates to the fall of a lady's feather fan. The criss-cross from the cane chair-back was imprinted on one sleep-flushed cheek, and her eyes, dim with the weariness of the night-watch, flew to the white-china door-knob.

Reader, rest undismayed. Mr. Trimp entered on the banking-hour legs of a scholar and a gentleman. With a white carnation in his buttonhole, his hat unbattered in the curve of his arm, and his blue eyes behind their curtain of black lashes, but slightly watery, like a thawing ice-pond with a film atop.

"Hello, my little Goldie-eyes!"

Mr. Trimp flashed his double deck of girlish-pearlish teeth. When Mr. Trimp smiled Greuze might have wanted to paint his lips for a child-study. Women tightened up about the throat and dared to wonder whether he wore a chest-protector and asafetida bag. Old ladies in street-cars regarded him through the mist of memories, and as if their motherly fingers itched to run through the heavy yellow hemp of his hair. There was that in his smile which seemed to provoke hand-painted sofa-pillows and baby-ribboned coat-hangers, knitted neckties, and cross-stitch slippers. Once he had posed for an Adonis underwear advertisement.

"Hello, baby! Did you wait up for your old man?"

Goldie regarded her husband with eyes that ten months of marriage had dimmed slightly. Her lips were thinner and tighter and silent.

"I think we landed a sucker to-night for fifty shares, kiddo. Ain't so bad, is it? And so you waited up for your tired old man, baby?"

"No!" she said, the words sparking from her lips like the hiss of a hot iron when you test it with a moist forefinger. "No; I didn't wait up. I been out with you--painting the town."

"I couldn't get home for supper, hon. Me and Cutty--"

"You and Cutty! I wasn't born yesterday!"

"Me and Cutty had a sucker out, baby. He'll bite for fifty shares sure!"

"Gee!" she flamed at him, backing round the rocker from his amorous advances. "Gee! If I was low enough to be a crook--if I was low enough to try and make a livin' sellin' dead dirt for pay dirt--I'd be a successful crook, anyway; I'd--"

"Now, Goldie, hon! Don't--"

"I wouldn't leave my wife havin' heart failure every time McCasky passes the door--I wouldn't!"

"Now, don't fuss at me, Goldie. I'm tired--dog-tired. I got some money comin' in to-morrow that'll--"

"That don't go with me any more!"

"Sure I have."

"I been set out on the street too many times before on promises like that; and it was always after a week of one of these here slow jags. I know them and how they begin. I know them!"

"'Tain't so this time, honey. I been--"

"I know them and how they begin, with your sweet, silky ways. I'd rather have you come staggering home than like this--with your claws hid. I--I'm afraid of you, I tell you. I ain't forgot the night up at Hinkey's. You haven't been out with Cutty no more than I have. You been up to the Crescent, where the Red Slipper is dancing this week, you--"

Mr. Trimp swayed ever so slightly--slightly as a silver reed in the lightest breeze that blows--and regained his balance immediately. His breath, redolent as a garden of spice and cloves, was close to his wife's neck.

"Baby," he said, "you better believe your old man. I been out with Cutty, Goldie. We had a sucker out!"

She sprang back from his touch, hot tears in her eyes.

"Believe you! I did till I learnt better. I believed you for four months, sittin' round waiting for you and your goings-on. You ain't been out with Cutty--you ain't been out with him one night this week. You been--you--"