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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"No, you! An old bachelor has got the right to sit closer to a girl-show
than a married man."

They drew up before a small table edging a shining area of reserved
floor space and only once removed from the burnt-orange curtains.

"A-ha!" exuded Mr. Samuel Kahn, his rather strongly aquiline face lifted
in profile.

"A-ha!" exuded Mr. Loeb, smiling out of eyes ten years younger.

"What'll you have, Sam?"

"Say, what's the difference? I'll take a cheese sandwich and a glass of
beer."

"Now cut that! Maybe I squealed about the twenty bucks, but that don't
make me out a short skate. This isn't Cherokee Garden at home, man. I'm
going to blow my brother-in-law to New-Year's Eve in my own way, or know
the reason why not. Here, waiter, a pint of extra dry and a layout of
sandwiches."

"If you can stand it, I guess I can!"

"It's not on the firm, either, Sam; it's on me!"

"For the price of to-night ma and Etta would hang themselves, ain't it?"

"Say, we only live once. I always tell ma she can't take it with her
when she goes. Anyways, for the discount we got on those Adler sport
skirts, we can afford to celebrate."

"Say, Herman, I wish I had a dime for every dollar that is spent up here
to-night. Look at the women! I guess American men don't make queens out
of their wives!"

"For every wife who's up here to-night I wouldn't take the trouble to
collect the dimes," said Mr. Loeb, with cunning distinction.

"I guess that ain't all wrong, neither. It isn't such a pleasure to be
away from your family New-Year's Eve, but I can assure you I'd rather
have Etta having her celebration with ma and grandma, and maybe the
Bambergers over at the house, than up here where even a married woman
can blush to be."

"Take it from me, old man, a flannel petticoat in the family is worth
all the ballet skirts on this roof put together."

"I bought ma and Etta each one of them handbags to-day at Lauer's for
nine dollars. What they don't know about the price won't hurt them. Two
for nine I'll tell them."

"To this day ma believes that five-hundred-dollar bar pin I brought her
two years ago from Pittsburgh cost fifty at auction."

"There's Moe Marx from Kansas City just coming in! Spy the blonde he's
with, will you? I guess Moe is used to that from home, nix! There's a
firm, Marx-Jastrow, made a mint last year."

"Look!"

The lights had sunk down, the sea of faces receding into fog. The buzz
died, too, and doors were swung against the steady shuffle of incomers.
From behind the curtains a chime tonged roundly and in one key.
One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--ten--eleven
--twelve!

Then the orange curtains parted and on a gilded dais the width of the
room, in startling relief against a purple circle the size of a tower
clock, the Old Year, hoar on his beard and with limbs that shivered in
an attitude of abdication, held out an hourglass to a pink-legged cherub
with a gold band in his or her short curls.

A shout went up and a great clanging of forks against frail glass, the
pop of corks and the quick fizz ensuing. The curtains closed and the
lights flashed up. Time had just sailed another knot into space, and
who cared?

At a center table a woman's slipper was already going the rounds. It
began to sag and wine to ooze through the brocade.

"Well, Hermie, here's a happy New Year to you!"

"And to you, Sam, and many of 'em!"

"To ma and Etta and grandma!"

"To Kahn, Loeb & Schulien!"

"To Kahn, Loeb & Schulien and that to this time next year we got the
Men's Clothing Annex."

They drank in solemn libation.

The curtains had parted again. A Pierrot, chalky white, whistled in
three registers, soprano, bass, and baser. A row of soubrettes rollicked
in and out again in a flash of bushy skirts.

"Say, look at the third one from this end with the black curls all
bobbing. I'm for her!"

"Where?"

"Gone now!"

Mr. Kahn leaned across his singing glass, his eye quickened into a wink.

"Old man, you can pull that woman-hater stuff on the home folks, but it
takes your brother-in-law to lead you to the live ones. Eh?"

"You dry up," said Mr. Loeb, peering between the halves of a sandwich.

On a glass runway built over the heads of the assembled, a crystal aisle
for satin feet, the row of soubrettes suddenly appeared, peering over
the crystal rail, singing down upon the sea of marcelled, bald, and dead
heads. Men, sheepish of their smiles but with the small heels overhead
clanging like castanets into their spirits, dared to glance up.

"Gad, Herman! What'll they think up next? Whatta you know about
that--all those little devils dancing right over our heads!"

"There she is!"

"Who?"

"The little one in the boy's black-satin suit, with the black curls
bobbing!"

"Watch out, Herm! You'll die of crick in the neck."

"I don't see any blinkers on you!"

"Hey, old man! Your mouth's open."

"I know. I opened it," said Mr. Loeb, his head back and eyes that were
suddenly bold staring up at the twinkling aisle.

At a table adjoining, a man reached up, flecking one of the tiny
black-satin feet with a whirl of his napkin.

Then Mr. Herman Loeb, of St. Louis, committed an act of spontaneous
combustion. When came the turn of the black satin and the bobbing curls
to bend over the rail directly above him, he flung wide his arms,
overturning a wine bottle.

"Jump!" he cried.

Beneath the short, black curls a mouth shaped like a bud reluctant to
open, blew him a kiss. Then came a cue of music like an avalanche, and
quicker than Harlequin's wink the aisle was clean.

"Gad!" said Mr. Loeb, his strong profile thrust forward and a light on
it.

"That little one with the black curls? Say! You can put her on your
watch-fob and take her home."

"Wouldn't mind!" said Mr. Loeb.

"You and Moe Marx are like all the women-haters. You don't know it, but
you're walking in your sleep and the tenth-story window's open."

"We oughtn't to come up here in business clothes," said Mr. Loeb, eying
his cuff-edges.

A woman sang of love. A chorus, crowned and girdled in inflated toy
balloons, wreathed in and out among the tables.

"She's not in that crowd."

Men to whom life for the most part was grim enough vied for whose
cigarette end should prick the painted bubbles. A fusillade ensued;
explosions on the gold-powdered air--a battle _de luxe!_

Mr. Kahn threw back his head, yawned, and slid a watch from his
waistcoat pocket.

"W-ell, a little of this goes a long way. If we want to pull out of this
town day after to-morrow we've got to get down to Cedar Street early in
the morning on that sweater job lot. It's about time for us to be
getting across to the hotel."

"Wait!" said Mr. Loeb.

A jingling and a right merry cacophony of sound came fast upon the
bubble bombardment, and then, to a light runnel of song, the row of
twenty-four, harnessed in slotted sleigh-bells and with little-girl
flounced frocks to their very sophisticated pink-silk knees.

The devices of vaudeville are perennial. Rigoletto, who set a court's
sides aching, danced to bells. The row of twenty-four, pink and white as
if the cradle had just yielded them up, shivered suddenly into an
ecstasy of sound, the jerked-up shoulder of one, the tossing curls of
another, the naughty shrug of a third, eking out a melody.

A laugh rose off the crowd.

"Say, this town'll fall for anything! That act's got barnacles. But the
little devils look cute, though. Say--say, old man, cut that out! This
is no place for your mother's son. Say!"

Mr. Loeb was leaning forward across the table, his head well ahead of
his shoulders. From the third from the end of the row of twenty-four, a
shoulder shrugging to the musical nonsense of bells was arching none too
indirectly toward him, and once the black curls bobbed, giving a share
of tremolo to the melody. But the bob was carefully directed, and Herman
Loeb returned it in fashion, only more vehemently and with repetition.

"Say, Herman, enough is enough! You'll have her here at the table next.
It's like Al Suss always says, the reason he woke up one morning and
found himself married to the first pony in the sextet was because he
stuck a stamp upside down on a letter to her and found he could be held
for a proposal in stamp language."

To a great flare of the Negroid music, the row of twenty-four suddenly
turned turtle, and prone on a strip of rug, heads to audience and faces
to ceiling, twenty-four pairs of legs, ankleted in bells, kicked up a
syncopated melody. From a Niagara of lace, insteps quivered an arpeggio.
A chromatic scale bounced off a row of rapidly pointing toes. The third
from the end, seized with sudden chill, quivered into grace notes,
small pink feet kicking violently to the chandelier.

Men red with laughter pounded their plates. The rhythmic convulsion
passed down the prostrate line, forty-eight little feet twinkled a grand
finale, and the curtains swung, then opened, remaining so.

The line of twenty-four danced down and across the wide hair-line that
separates life and stage, butterflies sipping from table to table. The
cabaret was done. Lights resumed, and the business of food and drink.

Mr. Loeb flung out an arm, pulling awry a carefully averted pink sash.

"Say, little Jingle Bells, you and your friend!"

"Cut it out, Herm! If we want to be down on Cedar Street by--"

"What's your hurry, little one?"

"It ain't mine; it belongs to the management."

"Won't you join us?"

"Herm, that job-lot of sweaters--"

"Oh, come on, little Jingle Bells!"

"My friend, too?"

"Sure your friend."

They teetered, the two of them like animated dolls, arm in arm, and so
at ease.

"Here, you little Black Curls, sit next to me, and you, Blondey, over
there by my brother-in-law."

"What'll you have, girls?"

"Anchovies and fine-chopped onions for mine. Tell 'em in the kitchen,
waiter, I said _fine_, and if the gentlemen are going to order wine,
bring me a plate of oyster crackers first to take off the edge of my
emptiness."

"Sure, another bottle of wine, waiter."

"Hermie, we--"

"And you, little Jingle Bells, same as Blondey's order?"

"Yeh."

"Say, you know what?"

"No. What?"

"I fell for those bouncing black curls of yours before I was in the
place five minutes."

At that there was an incredible flow of baby talk.

"Gemmemen ike ikkie gurl wiz naughty-naughty black curl-curlies?"

"You bet your life I do," said Mr. Loeb, unashamed of comprehension.

Mr. Kahn flashed another look at his watch.

"Say, don't you know, you girls oughtn't to keep us boys up so late.
Ain't there no wear out to you?"

The yellow curls to his right bounced sharply.

"He asks if there's a wear out to us, Cleone? I wish it to you this
minute, Baldy, that you had the muscles in the back of my legs. I guess
you think it's choice for us girls to come out on the floor after
the show!"

"Sylvette!"

"Yah, it's my New-Year's resolution to tell the truth for thirty minutes
if I'm bounced for it. If you got to know it, it's a ten-per-cent.
rake-off for us girls on every bottle of golden vichy you boys blow
us to."

"Honest, Sylvette, you're wearing scrambled eggs instead of brains
to-night. Why don't you cry a few brinies for the gemmemen while
you're at it!"

That so quickened Mr. Loeb's risibilities that he dropped his hand over
Miss Cleone St. Claire's, completely covering yet not touching it.

"You're a scream, kiddo! Gee! I like you!"

She drank with her chin flung up and her throat very white.

"Bubbles! Bubbles! God bless all my troubles!"

"Well, I'll be darned!" said Mr. Kahn, smiling at her.

"The gemmemen from out of town?"

"St. Louis."

"I had a friend out there--Joe Kelsannie, of Albuquerque. Remember him,
Sylvette?"

"Do I!"

"I'm going out there myself some day if the going's good, and get me a
cowboy west of Newark."

Mr. Loeb leaned forward, smiling into her quick-fire eyes.

"I'll take you!"

"Stick her on your watch-fob, Herman."

"No, sirree, I'll take her life size."

"Watch out, Hermie; remember the upside-down postage stamp!"

"Want to go, Jingle Bells?"

"Sure."

"But I'm on the level, little one. No kidding. Day after to-morrow. St.
Louis--with me!"

Miss Cleone St. Claire drew herself up, the doll look receding somewhat
from her gaze.

"Say, bo, you got me wrong. I'm one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine
thousand chorus girls you could introduce your sister to. Aren't
I, Syl?"

"You let that kid alone," said Miss Sylvette de Long, in a tone not
part of her rôle. "When the traffic policeman sticks up his mitt it's
time to halt, see?" Lines not before discernible in Miss De Long's face
had long since begun to creep out, smoky shadows beneath her eyes and a
sunburst of fine lines showing through the powder like stencil designs.

"Come on, Herm. It's getting late, and if we want to be down on Cedar--"

"You think I'm kidding this little black-eyed chum of yours, don't you,
Blondey?"

"Sure not! You want 'er to grace the head of your table and wear the
family heirlooms!"

"Well, Sam, you're my brother-in-law--married to my own sister and
living under the same roof with me--am I a habitual lady-fusser, or do
they call me Hermie the Hermit at home?"

"Never knew him to talk ten straight words to a skirt before, girls,"
said Mr. Kahn through a yawn; "and if you don't believe it, go out and
ask Louis Slupsky, who used to play chinies with him."

"Say, you," said Miss De Long, edging slightly, "you're about as funny
as a machine-gun, you are! If you got a private life, why ain't you back
in St. Louis a night like this, showing her and the kids a good time?"

She was frankly tired, her eyelids darkening.

"I wish to Heaven I was," said Mr. Kahn, suddenly. "Take it from me,
girl, it was nothing but a business hang-over kept me. Come, Herm,
if we--"

"You think I'm kidding little Jingle Bells, don't you?"

Miss St. Claire sat back against her chair; her black eyes had quieted.
"If you ain't kidding you must be crazy with the heat or dr--"

"Look at my glass. Have I touched it?"

"The man's raving, Syl! Wants to marry me and take me back to St. Louis,
Thursday."

"Cut the comedy and come! Herm, it's getting on to three in the
morning."

"This little girl keeps thinking I'm kidding, Blondey. I always knew if
I ever fell for matrimony it would be just like this. Right off the
reel. No funny business. Just bing! Bang! Done!"

"Catch me while I swoon--but he sounds on the level, Cleone."

"Well, what if he is? Of all the nerve! Whatta you know about me? How do
you know I haven't got three kids and a crippled husband at home? How do
you know--?"

"I know, little Jingle Bells! Why, I was as sure of you, the minute I
clapped eyes on you, as if we'd been raised next door to each other. I
can see right down in your little life like it was this glass of wine."

Miss St. Claire threw out her arms in a beautiful and sleepy gesture.

"Well, boys, this is a nice little party, but I got to get up at three
o'clock to-morrow afternoon, and I need the sleep. Oh, how I love my
morning sleep!" She drew back, her bare outflung arm pushing her from
the table. "If you'll call me and my room-mate a taxi--"

"No, you don't, Jingle Bells!"

He placed a hand that trembled slightly on the sleeved part of her arm.
She opened wider her very wide black eyes.

"Are you bats?" she said.

"I'm going to marry you and take you home with me, if I have to carry
you off like a partridge."

"Cleone, I tell you the man means it!"

"You're right, Blondey. I never meant anything more in my life."

A sudden shortness of manner crept over Mr. Kahn.

"Man, you're drunk!" he cried, springing to his feet.

"See my glass!"

"Then you're crazy!"

"Sit down, old Baldy. Why's he crazy? That little room-mate of mine is
as straight a little girl as--"

"Why, I tell you he's crazy! That man's the head of a big business. He
can't kick up any nonsense like this. Come on, Herm, cut the comedy.
It's time we were getting across to our hotel. Look at the crowd
thinning, and what's left is getting rough. Come!"

"If you don't know how to behave yourself, Sam, in the presence of these
ladies, maybe you better go back to the hotel alone. I'm going to see
these young ladies to their door, and before we go me and this little
girl are going to understand each other."

Mr. Kahn sat down again in some stupefaction.

"Well, of all the nerve! Who are you? Whatta you think I am? Syl, what's
his game?"

Miss De Long thrust forward her tired and thinning face; her eyes had a
mica gleam.

"Cleone, he wants to marry you. A decent man with a decent face from a
decent town has taken a shine to you and wants to marry you. M-a-r-r-y!
Do you get it, girl?"

"How do you know he's decent? I don't know no more about him than he
knows about me. I--"

"'Ain't you got no hunch on life, girl? Look at him! That's how I know
he's decent. So would you if you'd been in this business as long as me.
Can't you tell a real honest-to-God man when you see one? A business
man at that!"

"You got me right, Blondey. Kahn, Loeb & Schulien, Ladies' Wear, St.
Louis. Here's my card. You give me an hour to-morrow, Jingle Bells, and
I'll do all the credential stuff your little heart desires. Louis
Slupsky knows me and my whole family. His mother used to stuff feather
pillows for mine. Kahn here is my brother-in-law and partner in
business. He's a slow cuss and 'ain't grasped the situation yet. But are
you on, little one? Is it St. Louis Thursday morning, as Mrs.--?"

"Herm! You're cr--"

"Syl--what'll I--do?"

"An on-the-level guy, Cleone. Marry! Do you hear? M-a-r-r-y! Say, and it
couldn't happen to me!"

"Herman, man, I tell you you're off your head. Think once of your
home--ma, Etta, grandma--with a _goy_ girl that--"

"Easy there, Baldy, you're adding up wrong. You and her both celebrates
the same Sundays. If anybody should ask you for Sylvette de Long's birth
certificate, look it up under the P's. Birdie Pozner. It's the same with
my friend. Cleone, tell the gemmemen your real name! Well, I'll tell it
for you. Sadie Mosher, sister to the great Felix Mosher who played heavy
down at Shefsky's theater for twenty years. _Goy!_ Say, Sammie, it's too
bad a nut from the bug-house bought the Brooklyn Bridge to-day or I'd
try to sell it to you."

"Little Jingle Bells, if I put you in a taxi now and shoot up those
credentials, will you marry me to-morrow at noon?"

"I--oh, I dunno."

"Marry, he says to you, girl. Think of the minus number of times girls
like us get that little word whispered to 'em. Think of the short
season. Moncrieff's grouch. The back muscles of your legs! Marry, he
says to you, girl! Marry!"

"To-morrow at noon, little one?"

"I--I sleep till three."

"And it couldn't 'a' been me!"

"Little Jingle Bells?"

"Why, y-yes, I--I'm on."

At three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, in a magistrate's office,
beneath a framed engraving of a judicial court in wigged session, Herman
Schulien Loeb and Sadie Helen Mosher became as one. A bar of scant
metropolitan sunshine, miraculously let in by a cleft between two
skyscrapers, lay at the feet of the bride.

Slightly arear of them: Mr. Louis Slupsky; Mr. Samuel Kahn, with a
tinge the color of apoplexy in his face; and Miss Sylvette de Long, her
face thrust forward as if she heard melody. The voice of the magistrate
rose like a bird in slow flight, then settled to a brief drone.

* * * * *

East is East and West is West, and St. Louis is neither. It lies like a
mediator, the westerly hand of the east end of the country stretching
across the sullenest part of the Mississippi to clasp the easterly hand
of the west end of the country.

Indians have at one time or another left their chirography upon the face
of St. Louis. But all that is effaced now under the hot lava of
Americanism that is covering the major cities in more or less even
layers. Now it stands atop its Indian mounds, a metropolis of almost a
million souls, a twenty-story office-building upon the site of an old
trading-post, and a subway threatening the city's inners. There is a
highly restricted residence district given over to homes of the most
stucco period of the Italian Renaissance, and an art-museum, as high on
the brow of a hill as the Athenians loved to build. St. Louis has not
yet a Champs-Élysées or a Fifth Avenue. And of warm evenings it takes
its walks without hats. Neither is the café or the cabaret its
evening solace.

It dines, even in its renaissance section, placidly _chez soi;_ the
family activities of the day here thrown into a common pool of
discussion.

On Washington Boulevard, probably sixty dollars a foot removed from the
renaissance section, architecture suddenly turns an indifferent shoulder
to period, Queen Anne rubbing sloping roof with neighbor's concrete
sleeping-porch of the hygienic period. Only the building-line is
maintained, the houses sitting comfortably back and a well-hosed strip
of sidewalk, bordered in hardy maples, running clear and white out to De
Balaviere Avenue, where the _art-nouveau_ apartment-house begins to
invade. In winter bare branches meet in deadlock over this walk. On the
smooth macadamized road of Washington Boulevard automobiles try out
their speed limit.

One such wintry day, with the early dusk already invading, Mrs. Herman
Loeb, with red circles round her very black eyes, and her unrouged face
rather blotched, sat in one of the second-floor-front rooms of a double
buff-brick house on Washington Boulevard, hunched up in a red-velvet
chair, chin cupped in palm, and gazing, through perfectly adjusted
Honiton lace curtains, at the steady line of home-to-dinner motor-cars.

Warmth lay in that room, and a conservative mahogany elegance--a great
mahogany double bed, immaculately covered in white, with a large
monogram heavily hand-embroidered in its center; a mahogany swell-front
dresser, with a Honiton lace cover and a precise outlay of monogramed
silver. Over it a gilt-framed French engraving with "Maternal Love" writ
in elegant script beneath. A two-toned red rug ate in footsteps.

Mrs. Loeb let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes.
In her dark-stuff dress with its sheer-white collar, she was part of
the note of the room, except that her small bosom rose and fell too
rapidly. A pungent odor of cookery began to invade; the street lamps of
Washington Boulevard to pop out. The door from the hallway opened, but
at the entrance of her mother-in-law Mrs. Loeb did not rise, only folded
one foot closer under her.

"You, Sadie?"

"Yes."

"Herman home yet?"

"No."

"Smell? I fixed him red cabbage to-night."

"Yes, I smell."

"How she sits here in the dark. Thank goodness, Sadie, electricity we
don't have to economize on."

She pushed a wall key, a center chandelier of frosted electric bulbs
springing into radiance. In its immediate glare Mrs. Loeb regarded her
daughter-in-law, inert there beside the window.

"Get your embroidery, Sadie, and come down by me and Etta till the men
get home to supper. I want her to show you that cut-work stitch she's
putting in her lunch napkins."

"Ugh!"

"What?"

Mrs. Bertha Loeb approached with the forward peer of the nearsighted.
Time and maternity had had their whacks at her figure, her stoutness
enhanced by a bothersome shelf of bust, but her face--the same virile
profile of her son's and with the graying hair parted tightly from
it--guiltless of lines, except now, regarding her daughter-in-law, a
horizontal crease came into her brow.

"You want to go sit a while by grandma, then?"

"No. Gee! can't--can't a girl just sit up in her room quiet? I'm all
right."

"I didn't say, Sadie, you wasn't all right. Only a young girl with
everything to be thankful for don't need to sit up in her room like it
was a funeral, with her mother and sister and grandma in the
same house."

On the mahogany arms of her chair Mrs. Herman Loeb's small hand closed
in a tight fist over her damp wad of handkerchief,

"I--I--"

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Sadie, you been crying again."

"What if I have?"

"A fine answer from a girl to her mother."

"I--you--you drive me to it--your questions--"

"I shouldn't have the interest of my own son's wife at heart!"

"Can't a girl get--get blue?"

"Blue?"

"Yes, blue."

Mrs. Bertha Loeb reached out her hand with its wide marriage band
slightly indented in flesh; the back of that hand was speckled with
large, lightish freckles and trembled slightly.

"Sadie, ain't there just no way we can make you feel happy in St. Louis?
Last night through the door to my room I couldn't help hear again you
and Herman with a scene. Take your feet down off the plush, Sadie."

"Oh yes, you heard, all right."

"'Ain't you got a good home here, Sadie? Everything in the world a girl
could wish for! A husband as good as gold, like his poor dead father
before him. 'Ain't we done everything, me and my Etta, to make you feel
how--how glad we are to have you for our Hermie's wife?"

"Oh, I know, I know."

"What maybe we felt in the beginning--well, wasn't it natural, an only
son and coming such a surprise--all that's over now. Why, it's a
pleasure to see how grandma she loves you."

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