Part 15 (1/2)

”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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.ton of a man's coat.

Goldie Flint, beneath whose too-openwork s.h.i.+rt-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 censors.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ning with the love-of-life lamps, the mica powder of romance, and a brilliant antic.i.p.ation of Harry Trimp. Miss Gregory's were twenty years older and dulled like gla.s.s 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.”