Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole

herself out of bed. So awoke Adriana, too, with her hair falling in a torrent over her breasts and her languid limbs unfolding. She shook her hair backward with the changeless gesture of women, held her hands at arm's-length, and regarded them. They were whiter, and the broken nails were shaping themselves into ovals. A callous ridge along her forefinger, souvenir of a cistern which pumped reluctantly, was disappearing. She smiled to herself in the mirror, like the legendary people who have eyes to see the grass grow must smile at the secret of each blade. Then she slid into a high-necked, long-sleeved wrapper and bound the whorl of her hair in a loose bun at her neck. Mrs. Fallows's minimum-priced, minimum-sized hall bedroom speaks for its nine-by-twelve "neatly furnished" self. The hall bedrooms of Forty-fourth Street and Forty-fifth Street and Forty-_ad-infinitum_ Street are furnished in that same white-iron bed with the dented brass knobs, light-oak, easy-payment dresser, wash-stand, and square table with a too short fourth leg and shelf beneath for dust--and above the dresser, slightly askew, a heart-rendering, art-rendering version of "Narcissus at the Pool," or any of the well-worn incidents favorite to mythology and lithographers. But life, like love and the high cost of living and a good cigar, is comparative. To Della, stretching her limbs to the morning, Mrs. Fallows's carpeted fourth-floor back, painted furniture, and a light that sprang into brilliancy at a tweak, was a sybarite's retreat, eighteen hours removed from wash-day, and rising in the dark, black mud-roads and a dirt-colored shanty that met the wind broadside and trembled to its innards. Two flights below her a mezzo-soprano struggled for high C; adjoining, an early-morning-throated barytone leaned out of a doorway and called for a fresh towel. Came three staccato raps at Della's portal, and enter on the wings of the morning and a pair of white-topped, French-heeled shoes Miss Ysobel Du Prez, late of the third road company of the Broadway success, "Oh, Oh, Marietta!" and with a history in pony ballets that entitled her to a pedigree and honorable mention. "Girl, ain't you dressed yet? What you doin'? Waitin' for your French maid to get your French lawngerie from the French laundry?" Miss Du Prez swung herself atop the trunk and crossed her slim limbs. Chatelaine jewelry jangled; Herculean perfume dominated the air, and that expressive sobriquet for soubrette, a fourteen-inch willow-plume, and long as the tail of a male pheasant, brushed her left shoulder. Miss Ysobel Du Prez--one of the ornamental line of tottering caryatids who uphold on their narrow, whitewashed shoulders the gold-paper thrones of musical-comedy principalities, and on those same shoulders carry every tradition of that section of Broadway which Thespis occupies on a ninety-nine-year, privilege-of-renewal lease--the fumes of grease-paint the incense of her temple, the footlights the white flame of her sacrifice! "You gotta do a quick change if you're going to the offices with me to-day, girl. I gotta be up at the Empire in the Putney Building by eleven and stop in at the Bijou first." Delia shed her comfortable shroud of repose like Thais dropping her mantle in an Alexandrian theater. "I must 'a' overslept, Ysobel. Trying on them duds we bought yesterday up to so late last night done me up. Three days in New York ain't got me used to the pace." "You should worry! If I had your face and figure I'd sleep till the call-boy rapped twice." "Ah, Ysobel, you with your cute little face and cute little ways!" "Soft pedal on the ingenoo stuff, girl. You know you don't hate yourself. I didn't notice that you exactly despised anything about you when they called the floor-walker to have a look at you in that black dress yesterday." "Honest, Ysobel, I dreamt about it all night." "Sure you did! But who was it steered you into a 'slightly used,' classy place where you could buy a gown that Mrs. Asterbilt wore once to a reception at the Sultan of Sulu's or the Prince of Pilsen's or any of that crowd; who steered you in a place where you could buy a real gown for one-tenth the cost of production?" "You did, Ysobel. I don't know what I'd 'a' done if Mrs. Fallows hadn't brought you up." "That little black dream that only let you back twenty-nine-fifty cost three hundred if it cost a cent, and nothing but a snag in the hem and the lace in front as good as new. Gee, I could show this cheap bunch around here how to dress if I had a month's advance in hand!" "Get off the trunk, Ysobel, and sit here, will you? I want to get it out. Say, if Cottie could see me with the black hat to match! My little sister I was telling you about could--" "Who you got to thank? Who gave you the right steer? Take it from me, if I hadn't gone along with you, every store on Sixth Avenue would have X-rayed the corner of your handkerchief for the thirty-eight dollars tied up in it and body-snatched you for your own funeral. Even with me along you had a lean like a bent pin for that made-on-Canal-Street, thirty-two-fifty, red silk they hauled out of the morgue to show you. I seen you edgin' for that Kokome model." "Me and Cottie was always great ones for red. I ought to had the red serge you made so much fun of dyed for mourning, but Cottie--" "Red! When you, in a tight-lookin' black that hugs you like it was wet, and a black hat with a tilt that Anna Held would buy right off your head, can walk into any office in the row this morning and land in the show-girl row of any chorus on the bills. If you think that's an easy stunt, ask any girl in this house." "I--I ain't scared a bit now, since I'm going around with you, Ysobel: but gee, if I had to go alone!" "Fallows does the same thing for all of them. When I was in last spring from first pony in a Middle West company of the 'Merry Whirl'--remind me, and I'll show you my notices--when I was in last spring Fallows dumped a little doll-eyed soubrette on me that didn't do a thing, after I dragged her around to the offices, but grab a part away from me in a Snooky Ookums quartet that Jim Simmons was puttin' out." "Honest?" "Sure! A production I'd been holding off for all season. Me that's made the boards of more stages creak than she's ever seen!" "Mrs. Fallows says you're just the one to show me around, that you are one swell little pony, and an old one in the offices." "An old one in the offices! I don't see Fallows herself suffering from no growing-pains. They don't come any farther gone to seed than her. She tried to stick to her soft-shoe act till the office boys of the Consolidated Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Managers got up a subscription and bought her this four-flights' rooming-house to keep her feet busy with. Fallows better lay low with me or I can do some fancy tongue-work." "She didn't mean--" "Easy there, girl! Didn't I learn you for two hours last night to get the cold-cream on smooth, first? Smooth--now the powder--more white on the nose--more!" "Like that?" "Say, I met Vyette D'Orsay up in a office yesterday, and she thought I was tryin' out a comedy line on her when I told her I found one I had to learn how to make up." "Lily, a girl from our town, used to powder and--" "Little more red over the cheek-bones--see, honey?--like mine--say, if you wanna see swell work you ought to see me made up for spot--didn't I tell you to work back toward the ears? There--more--good! Don't give yourself a mouth like a low-comedy gash. Use the cheese-cloth, honey." "Look how it smears!" "There, a Cupid bow in the middle is all you need. You got a mouth just the size of a kiss, anyway." "John--John used to say about it that--" "Good! Say, you're some little learner--you are! Easy there--always line an eyebrow downward--there--more--so!" "So?" "Say, you got Zaza, Perfecta, Lillie Russell, and the whole hothouse bunch of them knocked through the glass ceiling." Delia leaned to her radiant reflection in the mirror and smiled through teeth faintly pink from the ruby richness of her lips. "You ought to see my little sister Cottie, Ysobel. When she comes you'll sit up and take real notice. I ain't even in her class. She can sit on her hair--it's so long--and it's so gold it's hot-lookin'." "Before I had typhoid mine was the same way--you can't put them dresses on over your head, girl. You gotta climb in--there ain't no room for a overhead act. There! Say, look at that side-drape, will you! I bet that lace set some dame back ten a yard. Some class! Don't forget to strike for thirty right off the bat--they'll think more of you. Say, girl, it's worth the time I'm wasting on you to see Casey's face when I steer you into there this morning." "Ain't it--a beauty, Ysobel! But it's a little tight, kinda--" "Now begin that again, will you? Honest, if Vyette could hear that line!" "Around the knees I mean, Ysobel. It's hard for me to walk." "If it was any looser I'd get a fit of the laughs like I did over that red serge. If it was any looser--for Gawd's sake, leave that neck open! No, no; down like that! A strip of real, lily-white, garden-variety neck, and she wants to pin it shut!" "I--I feel ashamed--I--I--kinda hate to leave it open." "Shades of Vyette! Leave that neck alone, can't you? After all my preachin' yesterday, look where I landed you. Nowheres!" "Like that, Ysobel?" "Take the pin out, there; center left like that. Say, girl, I wish you knew about this game what I've forgot." "Me, too, Ysobel." "Say, listen to her warblin' down there, will you? What's she practisin' for, I wonder--a chaser act on a four-a-day circuit? Breathe in, girl, you may be a perfect thirty-six, but you'll never make a tape-measure see it your way." "Shall I--shall I tell 'em I got a voice, Ysobel? Me and my little sister used to sing in--" Miss Du Prez glanced up over Della's shoulder and, by proxy of the mirror, their eyes met. The red of exertion was high in her face, and one corner of her mouth compressed over pins, so that her words leaked out as through the lips of a faun. "Voice! You remind me of the fellow that went down to Bowling Green to bowl. They got as much room for voices in musical comedy as a magazine's got for anything besides the advertisin' pages." "My little sister's got--" "Can you beat it? 'Voice,' she says. You put your voice in your ankles and waist-line, girl, and it'll get you further. And as for scales like our friend down-stairs, learn to keep the runners out of your silk stockings first. There, give it the Anna Held tilt--there--more--so!" "Oh-h-h, Ysobel--oh-h-h!" "Swell, and then some. Who you got to thank? Who steered you right?" Like a pale-gold aura of moonlight spreading out from behind a black cloud sprang Della's hair against the drooping brim of her hat. She was like a tight-draped, firm-stayed Venus, lyric in every line, her limbs wrapped in an ephod of grace and a skirt that restricted her steps like anklets joined by a too short chain. "Here, put them white gloves in your bag and save 'em for outside the office doors. Ready?" "Oh, Ysobel, if my little sister Cottie could only see me now!" "Don't forget the lines I learnt you last night--two years' experience on Western short circuit--spot-light work, and silent principal--thirty dollars." "Western short circuit--Western short circuit!" "Dancing and first-row promenade specialty." "Dancing and first--" "Say, you ain't unlearnt it already, have you?" "No--no." Down four flights of narrow, unlit stairs with their gauzy laughter, lingering in black hall corners, and then out into a sunlit morning.