Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
every feature was lyric.
Juliet might have looked like that when her love was young.
Mr. Barker arrived, but she met him diffidently, even shamefacedly.
Before she could explain he launched forth:
"I'm sorry, kiddo, but we'll have to make it to-morrow night for that
ride of ourn. That party I was tellin' you about is goin' to get busy on
that big deal, and I gotta do a lot of signin' up to-night."
Fate had carved a way for her with gentle hand.
"That's all right, Mr. Barker; just don't you feel badly about it." She
felt a gush of sympathy for him; for all humanity.
"You understand, kiddo, don't you? A feller's got to stick to business
as much as pleasure, and we'll hit the high places to-morrow night, all
right, all right. You're the classiest doll I've met yet."
She swallowed her distaste.
"That's the right idea, Mr. Barker; business appointments are always
important."
"I'll see you to-morrow mornin', and we'll fix up some swell party."
"Good night, Mr. Barker."
"So long, honey."
Directly after he departed Miss Ethyl bade her good night in cold,
cracky tones.
"The goin's-on in this parlor don't make it no place for a minister's
daughter, Miss Gertie Sprunt."
"Then you ought to be glad your father's a policeman," retorted her
friend, graciously. "Good night, dearie."
She hummed as she put her table in order. At each footstep down the
marble corridor her pulse quickened; she placed her cheeks in her hands,
vise-fashion, to feel of their unnatural heat. When Mr. Chase finally
came they met shyly and with certain restraint. Whispering together like
diffident children, they went out, their hands lightly touching.
Broadway was already alight; the cool spring air met them like tonic.
Like an exuberant lad, Mr. Chase led her to the curb. A huge,
mahogany-colored touring-car, caparisoned in nickel and upholstered in a
darker red, vibrated and snorted alongside. A chauffeur, with a striped
rug across his knees, reached back respectfully and flung open the door.
Like an automaton Gertrude placed her small foot upon the step and
paused, her dumfounded gaze confronting the equally stunned eyes of the
chauffeur. Mr. Chase aided and encouraged at her elbow.
"It's all right, dearest, it's all right; this is your surprise."
"Why," she gasped, her eyes never leaving the steel-blue shaved face of
the chauffeur--"why--I--"
Mr. Chase regarded her in some anxiety. "What a surprised little girl
you are! I shouldn't have taken you so unawares." He almost lifted her
in.
"This machine is yours, Mr. Chase?"
"Yes, dear, this machine is _ours_."
"You never told me anything."
"There is little to tell, Gertrude. I have not used my cars to amount to
anything since I'm back from Egypt. I've been pretty busy with affairs."
"Back from Egypt!"
"Do not look so helpless, dear. I'm only back three months from a trip
round the world, and I've been putting up with hotel life meanwhile.
Then I happened to meet you, and as long as you had me all sized up I
just let it go--that's all, dear."
"You're not the Mr. Adam Chase who's had the rose suite on the tenth
floor all winter?"
"That's me," he laughed.
Her slowly comprehending eyes did not leave his face.
"Why, I thought--I--you--"
"It was my use of the private elevator on the east side of the building
that gave you the Sixth Avenue idea, and it was too good a joke on me to
spoil, dearie."
She regarded him through blurry eyes.
"What must you think of me?"
He felt for her hand underneath the lap-robe.
"Among other things," he said, "I think that your eyes exactly match the
violets I motored out to get for you this morning at my place ten miles
up the Hudson."
"When did you go, dear?"
"Before you were up. We were back before ten, in spite of a spark-plug
that gave us some trouble."
"Oh," she said.
The figure at the wheel squirmed to be off. She lay back faint against
the upholstery.
"To think," she said, "that you should care for me!"
"My own dear girl!"
He touched a spring and the back of her seat reclined like a Morris
chair.
"Lie back, dear. I invented that scheme so I can recline at night and
watch the stars parade past. I toured that way all through Egypt."
The figure in the front seat gripped his wheel.
"Where are we going, Adam dear?" she whispered.
"This is your night, Gertrude; give James your orders."
She snuggled deeper into the dark-red upholstery, and their hands
clasped closer beneath the robe.
"James," she said, in a voice like a bell, "take us to the Vista for
dinner; afterward motor out along the Palisade drive, far out so that we
can see the Hudson by moonlight."
OTHER PEOPLE'S SHOES
At the close of a grilling summer that had sapped the life from the city
as insidiously as fever runs through veins and licks them up--at the
close of a day that had bleached the streets as dry as desert bones--Abe
Ginsburg closed his store half an hour earlier than usual because his
clerk, Miss Ruby Cohn, was enjoying a two days' vacation at the Long
Island Recreation Farm, and because a staggering pain behind his eyes
and zigzag down the back of his neck to his left shoulder-blade made the
shelves of shoe-boxes appear as if they were wavering with the
heat-dance of the atmosphere and ready to cast their neatly arranged
stock in a hopeless fuddle on the center of the floor.
Up-stairs, on an exact level with the elevated trains that tore past the
kitchen windows like speed monsters annihilating distance, Mrs. Ginsburg
poised a pie-pan aloft on the tips of five fingers and waltzed a knife
round the rim of the tin. A ragged ruffle of dough swung for a moment;
she snipped it off, leaving the pie pat and sleek.
Then Mrs. Ginsburg smiled until a too perfect row of badly executed
teeth showed their pink rubber gums, leaned over the delicate lid of the
pie, and with a three-pronged fork pricked out the doughy
inscription--ABE. Sarah baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors
had no more gracious zeal.
The waiting oven filled the kitchen with its gassy breath; a train
hurtled by and rattled the chandeliers, a stack of plates on a shelf,
and a blue-glass vase on the parlor mantel. A buzz-bell rang three
staccato times. Mrs. Ginsburg placed the pie on the table-edge and
hurried down a black aisle of hallway.
Book-agents, harbingers of a
dozen-cabinet-photographs-colored-crayon-thrown-in, and their kin have
all combined to make wary the gentle cliff-dweller. Mrs. Ginsburg opened
her door just wide enough to insert a narrow pencil, placed the tip of
her shoe in the aperture, and leaned her face against the jamb so that
from without half an eye burned through the crack.
"Abie? It ain't you, is it, Abie?"
"Don't get excited, mamma!"
"It ain't six o'clock yet, Abie--something ain't right with you!"
"Don't get excited, mamma! I just closed early for the heat. For what
should I keep open when a patent-leather shoe burns a hole in your
hand?"
"_Ach_, such a scare as you give me! If I'd 'a' known it I could have
had supper ready. It wouldn't hurt you to call up-stairs when you close
early--no consideration that boy has got for his mother! Poor papa! If
he so much as closed the store ten minutes earlier he used to call up
for me to heat the things--no consideration that boy has got for his old
mother!"
Mr. Ginsburg placed a heavy hand on each of his mother's shoulders and
kissed her while the words were unfinished and smoking on her lips.
"It's too hot to eat, mamma. Ain't I asked you every night during this
heat not to cook so much?"
"Just the same, when it comes to the table I see you eat. I never see
you refuse nothing--I bet you come twice for apple-pie to-night. Is the
hall table the place for your cuffs, Abie? I'm ashamed for the people
the way my house looks when you're home--no order that boy has got! I go
now and put my pie in the oven."
"I ain't hungry, mamma--honest! Don't fix no supper for me--I go in the
front room and lay down for a while. Never have I known such heat as I
had it in the store to-day--and with Miss Ruby gone it was bad enough, I
can tell you."
Mrs. Ginsburg reached up suddenly and turned high a tiny bead of
gas-light--it flared for a moment like a ragged-edged fan and then
settled into a sooty flare. In its low-candle-power light their faces
were far away and without outline--like shadows seen through the mirage
of a dream.
"Abie--tell mamma--you ain't sick, are you? Abie, you look pale."
"Now, mamma, begin to worry about nothing when--"
"It ain't like you to come up early, heat or no heat. _Ach!_ I should
have known when he comes up-stairs early it means something. What hurts
you, Abie? That's what I need yet, a sickness! What hurts you, Abie?"
"Mamma, the way you go on it's enough to make me sick if I ain't. Can't
a boy come up-stairs just because--"
"I know you like a book; when you close the store and lay down before
supper there's something wrong. Tell me, Abie--"
"All right, then! You know it so well I can't tell you nothing--all I
got is a little tiredness from the heat."
"Go in and lay down. Can't you tell mamma what hurts you, Abie? Are you
afraid it would give me a little pleasure if you tell me? No
consideration that boy has got for his mother!"
"Honest, mamma, ain't I told you three times I ain't nothing but tired?"
"He snaps me up yet like he was a turtle and me his worst enemy! For
what should I worry myself? For my part, I don't care. I only say, Abie,
if there's anything hurts you--you know how poor papa started to
complain just one night like this how he fussed at me when I wanted the
doctor. If there's anything hurts you--"
"There ain't, mamma."
"Come in and let me fix the sofa for you. I only say when you close the
store early there's something wrong. That Miss Ruby should go off
yet--vacation she has to have--a girl like that, with her satin shoes
and all--comes into the store at nine o'clock 'cause she runs to the
picture shows all night! Yetta Washeim seen her. Vacation yet she has to
have! Twenty years I spent with poor papa in the store, and no vacation
did I have. Lay down, Abie."
"All right, then," said Mr. Ginsburg, as if duty were a geological eon,
and throwing himself across the flowered velvet lounge in the parlor.
"I'll lay down if it suits you better."
Mr. Ginsburg was of a cut that never appears on a classy clothes
advertisement or in the silver frame on the bird's-eye maple
dressing-table of sweet sixteen or more; he belonged to the less
ornamented but not unimportant stratum that manufactures the classy
clothes by the hundred thousand, and eventually develops into husbands
and sponsors for full-length double-breasted sealskin coats for the
sweet sixteens and more.
He was as tall as Napoleon, with a round, un-Napoleonic head,
close-shaved so that his short-nap hair grew tight like moss on a rock,
and a beard that defied every hirsute precaution by pricking darkly
through the lower half of his face as phenomenally as the first
grass-blades of spring push out in an hour.
"Let me fix you a little something, Abie. I got grand broth in the
ice-box--all I need to do is to heat it."
"Ain't I told you I ain't hungry, mamma?"
"When that boy don't eat he's sick. I should worry yet! Poor papa! If
he'd listened to me he'd be living to-day. I'm your worst enemy--I am! I
work against my own child--that's the thanks what I get."
Sappho, who never wore a gingham wrapper and whose throat was unwrinkled
and full of music, never sang more surely than did Mrs. Ginsburg into
the heart-cells of her son. He reached out for her wrapper and drew her
to him.
"Aw, mamma, you know I don't mean nothing; just when you get all worried