Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
Ruby--you come to-morrow."
"Good night, mamma--to-morrow I see you."
"Good night, mamma. In less than an hour I be back--before the clock
strikes ten. You shouldn't make me go--I don't like to leave you here."
"Ach, you silly children! I'm glad for peace by myself. Look! I close
the door right on you."
"Good night, mamma. I be back by ten."
"Good-by, Abie."
"What?"
"Good night, children!"
* * * * *
When the clock in the parlor struck eleven Mrs. Ginsburg wiped dry her
last dish, flapped out her damp dish-towel, and hung it over a cord
stretched diagonally across a corner of the kitchen. Then she closed the
cupboard door on the rows of still warm dishes, slammed down the window
and locked it, reached up, turned out the gas, and groped into her
adjoining bedroom.
Reflected light from the Maginty kitchen lay in an oblong on the floor
and climbed half-way on the bed. By aid of the yellow oblong Mrs.
Ginsburg undressed slowly and like a withered Suzanne, who dared not
blush through her wrinkles.
The black wrapper, with empty arms dangling, she spread across a chair,
and atop of it a black cotton petticoat, sans all the gentle mysteries
of lace and frill. Lastly, beside the bed, in the very attitude of the
service of love, she placed her shoes--expressive shoes, swollen from
swollen joints, and full of the capacity for labor.
Then Mrs. Ginsburg climbed into bed, knees first, threw backward over
the foot-board the blue-and-white coverlet, and drew the sheet up about
her. A fresh-as-water breeze blew inward the lace curtain, admitting a
streak of light across her eyes and a merry draught about her head. The
parlor clock tonged the half-hour.
Silence for a while, then the black rush of a train, an intermittent
little plaint like the chirrup of a bird in its cage, the squeak of a
bed-post, and a succession of the unimportant noises that belong solely
to the mystery of night.
Finally, from under the sheet, the tremolo of a moan--the sob of a heart
that aches and, aching, dares not break.
THE OTHER CHEEK
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