Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
"I do wish it!"
They leaned into the wind.
"I--I don't mind rain much. Me and Mame and George are going to the Gem
to-night--they're showing the airship pictures over there. I ain't goin'
unless you're feelin' all right, though. They've got the swellest
pictures in town over there."
"It's much you care about leavin' me alone or not when you can run round
nights like a--like a--"
"Don't begin, Angie. A girl's got to have fun once in a while! Gee! the
way you been holding on to me! I--I ain't even met the fellows like the
other girls. All you think I like to do is sit home nights and sew. Look
at the other girls. Look at Mamie Plute--she's five years younger'n
me--only twenty-three; and she--"
"That's the thanks I get for protectin' and watchin' and raisin' and--"
"Aw, Angie, I--"
"Don't Angie me!"
"I--I ain't a kid--the way you fuss at me!"
They turned into their apartment house. A fire-escape ran zigzag down
its front, and on each side of the entrance ash-cans stood sentinel. At
each landing of their four flights up a blob of gas-light filled the
hallway with dim yellow fog, and from the cracks of closed doors came
the heterogeneous smells of steam, hot vapors, and damp--the
intermittent crying of children.
After the first and second flights Miss Angie paused and leaned against
the wall. Her breath came from between her dry lips like pants from an
engine, and beneath her eyes the parchment skin wrinkled and hung in
small sacs like those under the eyes of a veteran pelican.
"You take your time comin', Angie. I'll go ahead and light up and put on
some coffee for you--some real hot coffee."
Tillie ran lightly up the stairs. Through the opacity of the fog her
small, dark face was outlined as dimly as a ghost's, with somber eyes
burning in the sockets. Theirs was the last of a long hall of closed
doors--drab-looking doors with perpendicular panels and white-china
knobs.
Tillie fitted in her key, groped along the shadowy mantel for a match,
and lighted a side gas-bracket. Her dripping umbrella traced a wet path
on the carpet. She carried it out into the kitchenette and leaned it in
a corner of the sink. When Angie faltered in a moment later a
blue-granite coffee-pot was already beginning to bubble on the
two-burner gas-stove and the gentle sizzle of frying bacon sent a bluish
haze through the rooms.
"Say, Angie, how you want your egg?"
"I don't want none."
"Sure you do! I'll fry it and bring it in to you." Angie flopped down on
the davenport. Her skirt hung thick and dank about her ankles, and the
back of her coat and her sleeve-tops were rain-spotted and wet-wool
smelling where the umbrella had failed to protect her.
She unbuttoned the coat and the front of her shirt-waist, unlaced her
shoes and kicked them off her feet. In the sallow light her face, the
ocher wallpaper, the light oak center-table, the matting on the floor,
and the small tin trunk were of a color. She took up her shoes in one
hand, her coat in the other, and slouched off to a small one-window box
of a room, with an unmade cot and a straight chair two-thirds filling
it.
Happy the biographers whose Desdemonas burrow damask cheeks into silken
pillows, whose Prosperines limp on slim ghost-feet through Lands of
Fancy! Angie limped, too; but in her flat-arched, stockinged feet, and
to an unmade, tousled bed. And all the handmaids of her sex--Love,
Romance, and Beauty--were strangely absent; or could the most sybaritic
of biographers find them out?
Only half undressed she tumbled in, pulled the coverings tight up about
her neck, and turned her face to the wall. Poor Angie! Neither
Prosperine, Desdemona, nor any of the Lauras, Catherines, or Juliets,
had ever sold corsets, faced the soul-racking problem of eight dollars a
week, or been untouched by the golden wand that transforms life into a
phantasmagoria of love.
Tillie spread her little meal on the golden-oak table in the front room.
"Come on, Angie--or if you ain't feeling well I'll bring you in a bite."
"I ain't sick."
"Well, if you ain't sick, for Gawd's sake, where did you get the
grouch?"
"I'm comin' in if you give me time. Where's my wrapper?"
They dined in a desultory sort of way, with Tillie up and down
throughout the meal for a bread-knife, a cup of water, sugar for Angie's
strong coffee.
"If you ain't feelin' good to-night I won't go, Angie."
"I'm feelin' all right--I'm used to sittin' home alone."
"If you talk like that--I won't go, then."
"Sure! You go on! Don't mind me."
"There's another corset sale advertised for to-morrow, ain't there? Gee!
They don't care how many sales they spring on the girls down there, do
they? Didn't you just have your semi-annual clearin'?"
"Yes; but they got a batch of Queenly shapes--two-ninety-eight--they
want to get rid of. They're goin' to discontinue the line and put in the
Straight-Front Flexibles."
Angie sipped her coffee in long draughts. Her black flannel wrapper fell
away at the neck to reveal her unbleached throat, with two knobs for
neck-bones.
"Let the dishes be, Angie--I'll do 'em in the morning. I wonder if it's
raining yet? It's sure too cold to wear my old black. I'll have to wear
my tan."
Rain beat a fine tattoo against the windows. Tillie crossed and peered
anxiously out, cupping her eyes in her hand and straining through the
reflecting window-pane at the undistinguishable sky; her little
wren-like movements and eyes were full of nerves.
"It'll be all right with an umbrella," she urged--"eh, Angie?"
"Yes."
Tillie hurried to the little one-window room. There were two carmine
spots high on her cheek-bones; as she dressed herself before a wavy
mirror her lips were open and parted like a child's, and the breath came
warm and fast between them.
"I'll be home early to-night, Angie. You sleep on the davenport. I don't
mind the lumps in the cot."
She frizzed her front hair with a curling-iron she heated in the fan of
the gas-flame, and combed out the little spring-tight curls until they
framed her face like a fuzzy halo. Her pink lawn waist came high up
about her neck in a trig, tight-fitting collar; and when she finally
pressed on her sailor hat, and slid into her warm-looking tan jacket the
small magenta bow on her left coat-lapel heaved up and down with her
bosom.
"Say," she called through the open doorway, "I wish you'd see those
seventy-nine-cent gloves, Angie--already split! How'd yours wear, huh?"
Silence.
"You care if I wear yours to-night, Angie?"
Silence.
"Aw, Angie, if you're sick why don't you say so and not go spoilin' my
evening? Gee! If a girl would listen to you she'd have a swell time of
it--she would! A girl's gotta have life."
She fastened a slender gold chain with a dangling blue-enamel heart
round her neck.
"Aw, I guess I'll stay home. There ain't no fun in anything, with you
poutin' round like this."
Tillie appeared in the doorway, gloves in hand. Angie was still at the
uncleared table; her cheek lay on the red-and-white table-cloth, and her
face was turned away.
"Angie!"
The room was quiet with the ear-pressing silence of vacuum. Tillie
crossed and, with hands that trembled a bit, shook the figure at the
table. The limp arms slumped deeper, and the waist-line collapsed like a
meal-sack tied in the middle.
"Angie, honey!" Tillie's hand touched a cheek that was cold, but not
with the chill of autumn.
Then Tillie cried out--the love-of-life cry of to-day and to-morrow, and
all the echoing and re-echoing yesterdays--and along the dim-lit hall
the rows of doors opened as if she had touched their secret springs.
Hurrying feet--whispers--far-away faces--strange hands--a professional
voice and cold, shining instruments--the silence of the tomb--a
sheet-covered form on the red-velvet davenport! The fear of the
Alone--the fear of the Alone!
Miss Angie's funeral-day dawned ashen as dusk--a sodden day, with the
same autumn rain beating its one-tone tap against the windows and
ricochetting down the panes, like tears down a woman's cheeks.
At seven three alarm-clocks behind the various closed doors down the
narrow aisle of hallway sounded a simultaneous call to arms; and a
fourth reveille, promptly muffled beneath a pillow, thridded in the tiny
room with the rumpled cot and the wavy mirror.
Miss Mamie woke reluctantly, crammed the clock beneath the pillow of her
strange bed, and burrowed a precious moment longer in the tangled
bedclothes. Sleep tugged at her tired lids and oppressed her limbs. She
drifted for the merest second, floating off on the silken weft of a
half-conscious dream. Then memory thudded within her, and the
alarm-clock again thudded beneath the pillow.
She sprang out of bed, brushed the yellow mat of hair out of her eyes,
and wriggled into her clothes in tiptoe haste.
"Til!" she cried, peering into the darkened room beyond and pitching her
voice to a raspy little whisper. "Why didn't you wake me?"
She veered carefully round the gloom-shrouded furniture and dim-shaped,
black-covered object that occupied the center of the room, into the
kitchenette.
"I didn't mean to fall asleep, Til; honest, I didn't. Gee! Ain't I a
swell friend to have, comin' to stay with you all night and goin' dead
on you? But, honest, Til--may I die if it ain't so--with you away from
the counter all day yesterday, and the odds-and-ends sale on, I was so
tired last night I could 'a' dropped."
Tillie raised the gas-flame and pushed the coffee-pot forward. Through
the wreath of hot steam her little face was far away and oyster-colored.
"Come on, Mame; I got your breakfast. Ain't it a day, though? Poor
Angie--how she did hate the rain, and her havin' to be buried in it!"
"Ain't it a shame?--and her such a good soul! Honest, Til, ain't it
funny her being dead? Think of it--us home from the store and Angie
dead! Who'd 'a' thought one of them heart spells would take her off?"
"I ain't goin' to let you stay here only up to noon, Mame. There's no
use your gettin' docked a whole day. It's enough for me to go out to the
cemetery. You report at noon for half a day."
"Like fun I'm goin' to work at noon! You think I'm goin' to quit you and
leave you here alone? If Higgs don't like two of us being away from the
counter the old skinflint knows what he can do! He can regulate our
livin' with his stop-watch, but not our dyin'."
"There ain't nothin' for you to do round here, Mame--honest, there
ain't--except ride 'way out there in the rain and lose half a day.
She--she's all ready in her black-silk dress--all I got to do is follow
her out now."
"Gawd! What a day, too!"
"Carrie and Lil was going to stay with me this morning, too; but I says
to them, I says, there wasn't any use gettin' 'em down on us at the
store. What's the use of us all getting docked when you can't do any
good here? The undertaker's a nice-mannered man, and he'll ride--ride
out with me."
"You all alone and--"
"Everything's fixed--they sent up her benefit money from the store, and
I got enough for expenses and all; and she--she wouldn't want you to.
She was a great one herself for never missin' a day at the store."
Large tears welled in Tillie's eyes.
"She was a grand woman!" said Mame, warm tears in her own eyes, taking a
bite out of her slice of bread and washing it down with a swab of
coffee. "There--there wasn't a girl in the corsets wasn't crying
yesterday when they was gettin' up the collection for her flowers."
Tillie's lower lip quivered, and she set down her coffee untasted.
"She might have been a man-hater and strict with me, and all that--but
what did she have out of it? She was nothing but a drudge all her life.
Since I was a cash-girl she stuck to me like she--was my mother,