Part 11

In any event, after an evening of musical comedy and of gelatinous dancing, Hester awoke at four o’clock the next morning out of an hour of sound sleep, leaping to her knees there in bed like a quick flame, her gesture shooting straight up toward the jointure of wall and ceiling.

“Gerald!” she called, her smoky black hair floating around her and her arms cutting through the room’s blackness, “Gerald!” Suddenly the room was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald, the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her dressing-table and, more than that, the drained lakes of his sockets were deep with eyes. Yes; in all their amazing blueness, but queerly sharpened to steel points that went through Hester and through her as if bayonets were pushing into her breasts and her breathing.

“Gerald!” she shrieked, in one more cry that curdled the quiet, and sat up in bed, trembling and hugging herself, and breathing in until her lips were drawn shudderingly against her teeth like wind-sucked window-shades.

“Gerald!” And then the picture did a sort of moving-picture fade-out, and black Lottie came running with her hair grotesquely greased and flattened to take out the kink, and gave her a drink of water with the addition of two drops from a bottle, and turned on the night-light and went back to bed.

The next morning, Hester carried about what she called “a head,” and, since it was Wheeler’s day at Rosencranz, remained in bed until three o’clock, Kitty curled at the foot of it the greater part of the forenoon.

“It was the rotten night did me up. Dreams-- Ugh--dreams!”

“No wonder,” diagnosed Kitty sweetly. “Indigestion from having your cake and eating it.”

At three, she dressed and called for her car, driving down to the Ivy Funeral Rooms, a gothic Thanatopsis, set, with one of those laughs up her sleeves New York so loves to indulge in, right in the heart of the city, between an automobile-accessory shop and a quick-lunch room. Gerald had been buried from there with simple-flag-draped service in the Gothic chapel that was protected from the view and roar of the elevated trains by suitably stained windows. There was a check in Hester’s purse made out for an amount that corresponded to the statement she had received from the Ivy Funeral Rooms. And right here again, for the sake of your elucidation, I could wish at least for the neurologist’s chart. At the very door to the establishment--with one foot across the threshold, in fact--she paused, her face tilted toward the corner where wall and ceiling met, and at whatever she saw there, her eyes dilating widely, and her left hand springing to her bosom as if against the incision of quick steel. Then, without even entering, she rushed back to her car again, urging her chauffeur, at the risk of every speed-regulation, homeward.

That was the beginning of purgatorial weeks that were soon to tell on Hester. They actually brought out a streak of gray through her hair, which Lottie promptly dyed and worked under into the lower part of her coiffure. For herself, Hester would have let it remain.

Wheeler was frankly perplexed. God knows it was bad enough to be called upon to endure streaks of unreasonableness at Rosencranz, but Hester wasn’t there to show that side to him if she had it. To be pretty frank about it, she was well paid not to. Well paid! He’d done his part. More than nine out of ten would have done. Been made a jay of, if the truth was known. She was a Christmas-tree bauble, and was expected to throw off holiday iridescence. There were limits!

“You’re off your feed, girl. Go off by yourself and speed up.”

“It’s the nights, Gerald. Good God--I mean Wheeler! They kill me. I can’t sleep. Can’t you get a doctor who will give me stronger drops? He doesn’t know my case. Nerves, he calls it. It’s the head. If only I could get rid of this head!”

“You women and your nerves and your heads! Are you all alike? Get out and get some exercise. Keep down your gasoline bills and it will send your spirits up. There’s such a thing as having it too good.”

She tried to meet him in lighter vein after that, dressing her most bizarrely, and greeting him one night in a batik gown, a new process of dyeing that could be flamboyant and narrative in design. This one, a long, sinuous robe that enveloped her slimness like a flame, beginning down around the train in a sullen smoke and rushing up to her face in a burst of crimson.

He thought her so exquisitely rare that he was not above the poor, soggy device of drinking his dinner-wine from the cup of her small crimson slipper, and she dangled on his knee like the dangerous little flame she none too subtly purported to be, and he spanked her quickly and softly across the wrists because she was too nervous to hold the match steadily enough for his cigar to take light, and then kissed away all the mock sting.

But the next morning, at the fateful hour four o’clock, and in spite of four sleeping-drops, Lottie on the cot at the foot of her bed and the night-light burning, she awoke on the crest of such a shriek that a stiletto might have slit the silence, the end of the sheet crammed up and into her mouth, and, ignoring all of Lottie’s calming, sat up on her knees, her streaming eyes on the jointure of wall and ceiling, where the open accusing ones of Gerald looked down at her. It was not that they were terrible eyes. They were full of the sweet blue, and clear as lakes. It was only that they knew. Those eyes _knew_. _They knew!_ She tried the device there at four o’clock in the morning of tearing up the still unpaid check to the Ivy Funeral Rooms, and then she curled up in bed with her hand in the negro maid’s, and her face half buried in the pillow.

“Help me, Lottie,” she begged; “help me!”

“Law, pore child! Gettin’ the horrors every night this away! I’ve been through it before with other ladies. But I never saw a case of the sober horrors befoh. Looks like they’s the worst of all. Go to sleep, child. I’se holdin’.”

You see, Lottie had looked in on life where you and I might not. A bird’s-eye view may be very, very comprehensive, but a domestic-eye view can sometimes be very, very close.

And then, one night, after Hester had beat her hands down into the mattress and implored Gerald to close his accusing eyes and she had screamed and sobbed up against the jointure, she sat up in bed, waiting for the first streak of dawn to show itself, railing at the pain in her head.

“God, my head! Rub it, Lottie. My head! My eyes! The back of my neck!”

The next morning, she did what you probably have been expecting she would do. She up and dressed, sending Lottie to bed for a needed rest. Dressed herself in the little old blue-serge suit that had been hanging in the very back of a closet for four years, with a five- and two ten-dollar bills pinned into its pocket, and pressed the little five-dollar sailor down on the smooth winglike quality of her hair. She looked smaller, peculiarly indescribably younger. She wrote Wheeler a note, dropping it down the mail chute in the hall, and then came back, looking about rather aimlessly for something she might want to pack. There was nothing; so she went out quite bare and simply, with all her lovely jewels in the leather case on the upper shelf of the bedroom closet, as she had explained to Wheeler in the note.

That afternoon, she presented herself to Lichtig. He was again as you would expect--round-bellied, and wore his cigar up obliquely from one corner of his mouth. He engaged her immediately at an increase of five dollars a week, and as she was leaving with the promise to report at eight-thirty the next morning, he pinched her cheek, she pulling away angrily.

“None of that!”

“My mistake,” he apologized.

She considered it promiscuous and cheap, and you know her aversion for cheapness.

Then she obtained, after a few forays in and out of brownstone houses in West Forty-fifth Street, one of those hall bed-rooms so familiar to human-interest stories--the iron-bed, wash-stand, and slop-jar kind. There was a five-dollar advance required. That left her twenty dollars.

She shopped a bit then in an Eighth Avenue department store, and, with the day well on the wane, took a street-car up to the Ivy Funeral Rooms. This time, she entered, but the proprietor did not recognize her until she explained. As you know, she looked smaller and younger, and there was no tan car at the curb.

“I want to pay this off by the week,” she said, handing him out the statement and a much folded ten-dollar bill. He looked at her, surprised. “Yes,” she said, her teeth biting off the word in a click.

“Certainly,” he replied, handing her out a receipt for the ten.

“I will pay five dollars a week hereafter.”

“That will stretch it out to twenty-eight weeks,” he said, still doubtfully.

“I can’t help it; I must.”

“Certainly,” he said, “that will be all right,” but looking puzzled.

That night, she slept in the hall bedroom in the Eighth Avenue, machine-stitched nightgown. She dropped off about midnight, praying not to awaken at four. But she did--with a slight start, sitting up in bed, her eyes on the jointure.

Gerald’s face was there, and his blue eyes were open, but the steel points were gone. They were smiling eyes. They seemed to embrace her, to wash her in their fluid.

All her fear and the pain in her head were gone. She sat up, looking at him, the tears streaming down over her smile and her lips moving.

Then, sighing out like a child, she lay back on the pillow, turned over, and went to sleep.

* * * * *

And this is the story of Hester which so insisted to be told. I think she must have wanted you to know. And wanted Gerald to know that you know, and, in the end, I rather think she wanted God to know.

_Everybody’s Magazine_

“CAB, SIR?”

BY

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

“CAB, SIR?”[6]

By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

Reviewing the facts candidly, the sike now attributes his part in the crime to the stimulus of a third cup of tea. The first two he took because he was lonely. The third he had, for fellowship, on invitation from a gob and a flit who perceived his condition. They explained that they were lifelong friends, having originally met last week at a sing-song while waiting for their final discharge papers; and why not see New York first?

The sike said that he had no place to go short of College City, Missouri. The gob, it appeared, had plenty of places to go in the near vicinage, but did not wish to resume his old way of life which, he hinted, was ignominious if not actually criminal. The flit had to go to the dental clinic in the morning, so he didn’t care; he was feeling reckless and suicidal. The hour was that of slacktide on Broadway, when the chorus is just opening the second act.

“What is that which it is that we make to do this evening?” inquired the gob, as they emerged from the War Camp Community Service Club on Twenty-seventh Street.

Having taken the cantonment course in Uncle Sam’s French Idioms for the Idiotic, the others comprehended at once.

“Would a bus ride be a good start?” suggested the sike.

“Take a walk and get the kinks out of us,” amended the flit who still suffered from transport cramp.

“What-ho about a roof-show?” queried the gob.

Madison Square Garden loomed flatly beside them while they were still debating it by the ambulant method. A shaft of light from a side exit fell across their path. The flit blinked into the aperture and withdrew his tongue from his most peevish tooth for the purpose of remarking: “Whoa, Dobbin!”

“It’s a tank,” observed the sike, following his gaze. “What does the sign say?” He pointed to a placard, pendent from the creature’s neck.

“‘To be returned,’” read the gob.

“To return it, you first got to take it out,” argued the flit. “It spoke just in time. Maudie, I’m your little return ticket.”

“You!” said the gob incredulously. “Where do you come in? Can you run that thing?”

“I can run anything that drinks gasoline.”

“It looks like Providence by special arrangement,” observed the gob. “What do _you_ say, Buddy?”

“I told you I was for a bus ride,” returned the sike under the influence of the third cup of tea.

“D’you reckon this reptile’s got a keeper?” asked the flit. He entered the passageway and looked about, but found no one. “Or a mouth?” he proceeded. “We’ve got to persuade it to swallow us. Hey, gob; you’re tender and juicy. Tackle its whiskers.”

“Those aren’t whiskers. Those are machine guns. Hi! Eureka! Here’s the door with ‘welcome’ on the mat.” At his touch a panel at the front slowly unfolded outward, displaying a lighted interior.

“Who’ll join me in the Jonah Club?” invited the flit, plunging down the wide gullet. “It’s my idea we’d better get moving before our little whale gets to whinnying and raises its master. All aboard that’s going aboard. Public Library, Eagle Hotel, Soldier’s Monument and way stations to the Guard-House!”

The others clambered into the monster’s interior. Its mouth closed after them.

“Now, I hope the dum thing responds to gentle treatment,” the flit said. “I see how she starts, but I gotta take a chance on how she steers. Are you ready? Grab and stick; she may buck. Go!”

He did something intricate and skilled to some levers. With a noise as of a boiler-shop attacked by convulsions, the tank moved majestically forth and, after a moment of doubt, which nearly cost a taxi its life, turned to the left and the bright lights. The voyage had begun.

Here, for the benefit of those who have been living, since the war began, a retired life in Tierra del Fuego or Spitzbergen, it may be well to explain the terms of the fellowship. A sike is a private of the Psychological Division of the Army Medical Corps. Morale is his special concern; he is the man who keeps things stirring in camp when it has rained for three solid weeks and the mail has gone wrong and war is all that Sherman said of it and more. He is usually a college professor who has seen a great light. This one was, and had. His name is Follansbee James. A flit is a flying and prying person who snoops about in an airplane of low elevation and manners, poking his nose into matters which it is undesirable that he should know. Such is the shamelessness of our Government that our flit, Frederick Slayter by name, had actually been decorated for his ill-bred performances. A gob is, of course--though nobody knows why--an able seaman. Mr. “Chaw” Veeder was unusually able. He had other names, but they had vanished owing to his propensity for conserving a plug of tobacco unobtrusively in his cheek. There is a deal of hidden vice in our Navy. Having thus satisfied, I trust, inquiring minds of a scientific and philological bent, I will now return to the deliberate and uproarious conveyance wherein I have left the trio.

Bhoong - barrang - whroo - oo - oom - prrrrawng - bomp - clink - whang - oomble - gawmmle-_BOOM_! The tank proceeded westward on Twenty-seventh Street at a breakneck pace of three miles an hour. Windows flew up. Pajama-clad figures, and others more frilly, appeared therein, making somnolent and wrathful gestures. Scandalized inhabitants rushed out of doorways and rushed in again, for the tank was steering wildly. The gob funneled his hands toward the flit.

“Where you going?” he bellowed above the riot.

The answer came back faint and fragmentary, “Don’t--how--’amthing--steers.”

In a spirit of misplaced helpfulness, the gob seized a lever and pulled it. Straightway the tank paused, turned on its heel, executed a couple of airy pirouettes and with a metallic roar rushed up on the sidewalk and totally obliterated three garbage-cans which had been playing the extrahazardous rôle of innocent bystanders. It then cut obliquely across the corner, gently but firmly removed an electric-light pole which sought to stay its pace, debouched into Fifth Avenue, and pointing its nose up-town, resumed its sedate progress.

“Don’t--excite--agin,” bawled the flit at the wheel reprovingly to the gob. “Flighty--little--whiffet. Letter--own--way.”

Ensconced at a peep-hole the sike now delivered tidings in a strained yell, “Cavalry attack.”

The flit threw off the power so suddenly that his two companions came and sat on his neck. Amidst the ensuing peace the night roar of Fifth Avenue was as the splash of ripples upon a gently sloping beach.

“Get off me!” protested the engineer. “I’m going to chin with the law.”

He opened the door and a policeman’s head appeared. At the same moment the sike retired and was dimly seen behind a stanchion busily writing what the gob surmised to be a long farewell to home and loved ones. The cop opened a mouth upon which lurked the suspicion of a grin.

“Where are you boys trundling your little alarm-clock on wheels?” he inquired.

“Back to quarters,” replied the flit glibly.

The officer’s glance fell upon the spread wings of the flit’s service. “Looka-here,” he observed. “You belong to the flying, don’t you? You’re in the wrong kind of bus.”

“I’m goin’ to fly this,” asserted the operator blandly, “as soon as we come to a good take-off.”

“Sure!” agreed the cop. “I’d like to go up with you. Just the same, I’ll take a look at your papers. Hand ’em out.”

The flit’s hand started to his head to scratch for ideas, when it was arrested midway by another hand pressing into it a sheet of paper. A whisper from the sike did the rest. The document was duly presented to the representative of the civil law who read therein, under the insignium of the War Camp Community Service, which looks very official and authoritative, if not too closely scrutinized, that Corporal F. Slayter of the Aero Service, Able Seaman Veeder, and Private James of the Sanitary Corps, U. S. A., were specially detailed to operate Tractor Tank No. 13 in such highways of New York City as they might select for demonstration purposes.

“That gets by with me,” announced the officer. “And I’ll pass the word up the Avenue. But look out for the side-streets. Some of the cops on duty there are mean, suspicious guys that wouldn’t be above spoiling a pleasant evening.”

“Jesse James,” observed the flit, turning admiringly to the sike, after the obstacle to progress had withdrawn, “as a psychologist you’re a high-class forger. That touch about ‘demonstration purposes’--that’s bad, I guess! We could swim the tank in Central Park Reservoir or shin it up the Obelisk on the strength of that.”

“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that next week I’ll be burbling about ethics in a stuffy classroom.”

“Maybe not,” returned the gob. “If Slayter does any more of his fancy evolutions, you may be in the hospital.”

“Oh, I’ve got her now,” asseverated the helmsman confidently, starting up the machinery. “--levers,” he yelled, “control-caterpillars. Pull--right--and--” He did so, and the tank, executing a right about face, chased a horrified limousine half-way up a flight of brownstone steps. “Come back!” vociferated the exasperated flit, and hauled the left lever with such telling effect that (so the gob and the sike solemnly declare) the Waldorf-Astoria leaped a foot from its foundations and then escaped annihilation only by a fraction of an inch.

“For Mike’s sake!” howled the gob. “Stick to the straight-and-narrow.”

They lurched back into the main current, with a noise as of cosmic dissolution, and the traffic broke and fled before their measured progress. As they went, there came from the rear of the interior a sound faint, faraway, and vague like the plaint of a discouraged cricket. It was the sike singing:

“We don’t know where we’re going But we’re on--our--way.”

“That reminds me,” said the flit, shutting off. “Where _are_ we going?”

“Rubbernecking,” suggested the gob.

“I’ve got an idea,” offered the sike. “If the captain of this buoyant craft could steer around a corner--”

“I can steer around any number of corners,” asserted the flit with a shade of offense in his tone.

“Simultaneously,” added the gob.

“Looka-here, Chaw!” cried the operator hotly. “If you don’t like the way I run this bus--”

“Calm yourself, corporal,” adjured the sike, “and tell me, do you think you could negotiate the perilous straits that lead to the stage door of that sprightly ragtime operetta, taken from the French without opposition on their part and entitled ‘Cherchez la Chicken’? I have important business there.”

“Cutie in the chorus,” surmised the flit, looking pained and moral. “Oh, Perfessor! I bid for an introduction. We’re off!”

Cautiously manipulating the controls, the chauffeur contrived to achieve the turn into the side street with no incident or accident other than the conversion of a too torpid fruit-stand into a mixture of wood-pulp and citrus juices, the proprietor barely escaping with his life. The last act of “Cherchez la Chicken” had reached that point of delicate and original humor where the comedian, seated in a custard pie, sings a farewell to his mother-in-law while the chorus dances, when the side-alley which leads up to the stage burst into thunderous reverberations. There are numerous exits from the place--it is the one redeeming virtue of the show--and all of them promptly jammed. The comedian arose from the pie. The soprano fainted. The chorus dispersed. The management, wringing its already overringed hands, rushed out into the alley, now being patrolled by the tank, back and forth, amidst horrible echoes.

“Go away!” he shrieked. “What you want? Shut your noise.”

The monster fell silent. From the orifice which should have been its mouth, the serious face of the sike emerged.

“Sir,” said he, “last night I attended your performance.”

“Who are you?” demanded the manager. “You spoil my show!”

“Four days’ pay you mulcted me. And you seated me behind a pillar.”

“Tell your troubles to the box-office,” retorted the manager brutally. “I ain’t inter--”

“I willingly concede,” continued the sike calmly, “that the pillar was preferable, from any view-point, to the performance. But I want my four dollars back.”

“A fat chance!” retorted the manager.

“Half speed ahead, if you please,” requested the sike.

“Phsrang - bang - guzzoom - wurrong - kong-hong-whang!” clamored the monster, advancing upon the manager.

“Yi-yi-hi! Whoo-oo-ee-ee-ee!” sounded in piercing antiphony from within, where the soprano was having hysterics.

From the fourth rung of the fire-escape ladder the manager waved surrender with a roll of bills. “Blackmail!” he moaned as the sike selected a five and returned a dollar. “Please go away quietly.”

The sike, turning, was intercepted by a small, fattish gentleman in evening clothes.

“On behalf of self and friend,” said the man, “I thank you.”

“You are attending the performance?” inquired the sike politely.

“I am. Less fortunate than yourself I did not draw a pillar. As for my friend, whom I was seeking to distract from a depression of the soul, he insulted me and fled. He is now doubtless wandering about the city, a prey to unrelieved melancholy.”

“What’s biting your friend?” queried the flit, projecting an interested face into the dialogue.

The stranger accepted the interrogation in the spirit of metaphor in which it was offered. “Woman,” he stated succinctly. “If you should happen to encounter six-foot two of correctly attired manhood baying the moon on a street corner, that is him. Or, if not him, he. Be kind to him, address him as Reuben Renssalaer Watts, and play him your little anvil chorus. It might cheer him up. I return to my martyrdom.” He saluted and retired.