What Will People Say? A Novel
Johns. Besides, he tangoes like he had two left feet."
Forbes was uneasy till Persis whispered, "Don't you just love them?"
Then a door opened and they debarked into a crowded anteroom. While they
waited for the car to descend and rise again with the rest of the party
the women gave their wraps to a maid, and Forbes delivered his coat and
hat and stick across a counter to a hat-boy.
When Ten Eyck, Willie, and Bob appeared and had checked their things the
seven climbed a crowded staircase into an atmosphere riotous with
chatter and dance-music of a peculiarly rowdy rhythm.
But they could only hear and feel the throb of it. They could not see
the dancers, so thick a crowd was ahead of them.
A head waiter appeared, and, curt as he was with the rest of the mob, he
was pitifully regretful at losing Mr. Enslee, who had failed to reserve
a table and who would not wait.
It was disgusting to slink back down the stairs, regain the wraps and
coats and hats, and make two elevator-loads again. Willie alone was
cheerful.
"Now, maybe you'll go to the Plaza or some place and have a human
supper."
"I'm going to have a trot and a tango if I have to hunt the town over,"
said Persis.
Willie gnashed his teeth, but had the car recalled, and asked her where
she would go.
"Let's try the Beaux Arts," she said; and they huddled together once
more.
"It's too bad we were thrown out of Reisenweber's," Winifred pouted. "I
was dying to see Francois dance and have a dance with him."
Forbes felt well enough acquainted by now to ask: "Pardon my ignorance,
but who is Francois?"
"Oh, he's a love of a French lad," said Winifred. "Everybody's mad over
him. I used to see him in Paris dancing between the tables at the Cafe
de Paris or the Pre-Catalan with some girl or other. Then somebody
brought him over here for a musical comedy, and he's been on the crest
of the wave ever since."
"They say he's getting rich dancing in theaters and restaurants and
giving lessons at twenty-five per."
"Somebody was telling me he actually makes fifteen hundred to two
thousand dollars a week," said Mrs. Neff.
"If I had that much, would you marry me, Persis?" said Ten Eyck.
"In a minute," said Persis. "We might earn it ourselves. You dance as
well as he does, and you could practise whirling me round your neck."
"Then we're engaged," said Ten Eyck.
"It's outrageous!" said Willie. "That fellow with an income equal to
five per cent. on a couple of million dollars."
"What you kicking about, Willie?" said Winifred. "You get several times
as much, and you never lifted hand or foot in your life."
"But Willie's father did," said Mrs. Neff. "He killed himself working."
"Willie has it much better arranged," said Bob. "Instead of Willie
working for money he has the money working for him."
"It works while he sleeps," said Winifred.
Forbes was thinking gloomily in the gloom of the car. This dancer, this
mountebank, Francois, was earning as much in a week as the government
paid him in a year, after all his training, his campaigning, his
readiness to take up his residence or lay down his life wherever he was
told to.
Then he compared his income with Willie Enslee's. Enslee did not even
dance for his supper, yet into his banks gold rained where pennies
dribbled into Forbes' meager purse. And it was not a precarious salary
such as dancers and soldiers earned by their toil; it was the mere sweat
from great slumbering masses of treasure.
Forbes felt no longer an exultance at falling in with these people. He
felt ashamed of himself. He was no more a part of the company he kept
than a gnat on an ox or a flea caught up in the ermine of a king. The
air grew oppressive. He felt like a tenement waif patronized for a
moment on a whim, and likely to be tossed back to his poverty at any
moment. He wanted to get out before he was put out. The very luxuries
that enthralled him at first were intolerable now. The perfume of the
women and their flowers lost its savor. Their graces had gone. They were
all elbows and knees. He suffocated as in a black hole of Calcutta.
When a footman at the Cafe des Beaux Arts wrenched the door open and let
the cool air in, it was welcome. Forbes moved to escape. But he was kept
prisoner while Bob was sent as an avant courier. He returned with the
bad news that he was unable even to reach a head waiter.
The car nosed round, turned with difficulty, and went to Bustanoby's. It
was the same story here.
"New York's gone mad, I tell you!" Willie raved. "And nobody is as crazy
as we are. To think of us going about like a gang of beggars pleading
to be taken in and allowed to dance with a lot of hoodlums and muckers.
Even they won't have us."
"We'll try once more," said Persis. "The Cafe de Ninive."
After a brief voyage farther along Broadway the suppliant outcasts
entered a great hall imposingly decorated with winged bulls and other
Assyrian symbols. The huge space of the restaurant was a desert of
tables untenanted save by a few dejected waiters and a few couples
evidently in need of solitude.
An elevator took the determined Persis and her cohort up to another
thronged vestibule.
Persis had said to Willie in the car, "If you don't get us a table here
I'll never speak to you again."
With this threat as a spur Little Willie accosted a large captain of
waiters, who shrugged his shoulders and indicated the crowd inside and
the crowd outside. Willie fumbled in his pockets, and his hand slyly met
that of the captain, who glanced into his palm, then up to heaven in
gratitude, and laid aside all scruple.
Willie triumphantly beckoned Persis, who approached the captain with the
pouting appeal of a lady of the court to a relenting sovereign.
"Fritz," she said, "you've got to take care of us."
"How can I refuse Mees Cabot," said Fritz. "Do you weesh to seet and
watch the artists, or to seet weeth the dancers?"
"We want to dance," said Persis.
"There is one table resairve for a very great patron. You shall have it.
I shall lose me my poseetion, and he will tear down the beelding; but
that is better as to turn away Mees Cabot and Meester Enslee."
He whispered to a horrified captain on the other side of a silk rope.
The barrier was removed, and they were within the sacred inclosure,
while the baffled remnant gnashed its teeth outside.
CHAPTER VII
The room they were in was a mass of tables compacted around a central
space, where professional entertainers were displaying the latest
fashions in song and dance. A pair of "Texas Tommy" dancers were
finishing a wild gallopade with a climax, in which the man hurled the
woman aloft as if he were playing diabolo with her, caught her on his
long sticks of arms, and spun her round his neck, then let her drop head
first, rescuing her from a crash by the breadth of her hair, swinging
her back between his legs and across his hip. When her heels touched the
floor he bent her almost double and gazed Apache murder into her eyes.
Her hair fell loose on cue, and then he righted her, and they were
bowing to the rapturous applause. When they retired they were panting
like hunted rabbits and sweating like stevedores.
And now a somewhat haggard girl, who looked as if she had forgotten how
to sleep, dashed forward in a snowbird costume and sang a sleigh-bell
song. Little bells jingled about her, and the crowd kept time by tapping
wine-glasses with forks or spoons. Some kept time also with their
rhythmic jaws.
The girl sang in a mock childish voice in the nasal dialect of the
vaudevilles, with "yee-oo" for "you," and "tree-oo" for "true," and
"lahv" for "love." The words of the song were too innocent, and not
important enough to detain Persis, who felt herself drawn by the distant
music of a turkey-trot in the farthest room. The warring counterpoint of
the two orchestras only added to the lawless excitement of the throng.
The dance was just over, and the dancers were settling down to their
chairs, their deserted plates and glasses. The guide led them to the
only empty table, whisked off the card "Reserved," and turned them over
to a waiter.
While Willie scanned the supper card Mrs. Neff lapsed into reminiscence.
It was the only sign she had given thus far that she had earned her
white hair by age, and not by a bleach.
"Funny how this building tells the story of the last few years," she
said. "A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a
good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink,
talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and
preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. And now the
place down-stairs is deserted. Just taking late supper is like going to
prayer-meeting.
"Then somebody started the cabaret. And we flocked to that. We ate the
filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine, and didn't care so long as
they had some sensational dancer or singer cavorting in the aisle. They
were so close you could hear them grunt, and they looked like frights in
their make-up. But we thought it was exciting, and the preachers said it
was awful. But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite
respectable.
"At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the
professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers
and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong, so, as my
youngest boy says, 'What's the use and what's the diff?'"
"Only one thing worries me," said Winifred, as she peeled her gloves
from her great arms and her tiny hands. "What will come next? Even this
can't keep us interested much longer."
"The next thing," Willie snapped, "will be that we'll all go into
vaudeville and do flip-flaps and the split and such things before a
hired audience of reformed ballet-girls."
"I hope they play a tango next," was all Persis said. "Willie, call a
waiter and ask him to ask the orchestra to play a tango."
"Wait, can't you?" he protested. "Let's get something to eat ordered
first. We've got to buy champagne to hold our table; but we don't have
to drink the stuff. What do you want, Persis? Winifred? Mrs. Neff, what
do you want?--a little caviar to give us an appetite, what? What sort of
a cocktail, eh? What sort of a cocktail, uh?"
Before an answer could be made the orchestra struck up a tune of
extraordinary flippance. People began to jig in their chairs, others
rose and were in the stride before they had finished the mouthfuls they
were surprised with; several caught a hasty gulp of wine with the right
hand while the left groped for the partner. The frenzy to dance was the
strangest thing about it.
"Come on, Murray!" cried Persis. "Willie, order anything. It doesn't
matter." Her voice trailed after her, for she was already backing off
into the maelstrom with her arms cradled in Ten Eyck's arms.
Bob Fielding, with his usual omission of speech, swept Winifred from her
chair, and she went into the stream like a ship gliding from her
launching-chute. Mrs. Neff looked invitingly at Willie, but he answered
the implication:
"I'll not stir till I've had food."
Forbes leaned over to explain to the marooned matron:
"I wish I could ask you to honor me; but I don't know how."
She smiled almost intolerantly and sank back with a sigh just as a huge
and elderly man of capitalistic appearance skipped across the floor and
bowed to her knees. She fairly bounded into his arms. The two white
polls mingled their venerable locks, but their curvettings were
remarkably coltish. Mrs. Neff, who had sons in college and daughters of
marriageable age, was giving an amazing exhibition. She backed and
filled like a yacht in stays; she bucked and ducked like a yacht in a