Back STreet (18 page)

Curious, but to the Ray Schmidt to whom the constant public excitements of hotel lobbies, racetracks, variety theaters had once been staff of life, the need for recreational and social contacts in the big new city scarcely troubled her. There were always men to be met, through business contacts, the boardinghouse, through the girls with whom she almost unavoidably established acquaintanceship in washrooms, office and boardinghouse, but gone was much of the old zest that had once given her the vitality to rig herself in the most extreme accouterments of fashion and sail past the Stag Hotel on Vine Street for the paradoxical emotions of resentment and thrill as the comments flew.

Still given to the vagaries of fashion, the zest for parade, however, was gone. Once or twice, in something spick-and-span off her dressmaker’s-form, she had sailed down that aisle of a thousand eyes known as the Peacock Alley of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and, as of old, heads had swung. Once on a Fifth Avenue, Easter morning, as she sailed past St. Thomas’s Church, attired in a brand-new navy-blue bolero suit with a freely gored skirt whose brush binding swept the ground, and a bolero jacket trimmed with brass buttons off the uniform of a United States Army officer, whom she had met at a public charity euchre, newspaper-cameras had clicked after her. But while she followed the vagaries of fashion, and thought little of stitching away until past midnight on tomorrow’s newest thingumbob in millinery, the real zest was gone. You dressed well because you had a figure, needed to look well at business, and because, well, because you were that kind of person. You had style!

A couple of stockbrokers in Wall Street, whom she had come
to meet, never mind how, were fond of taking her out on this score. To boxing bouts at Madison Square Garden; to Tony Pastor’s or to Parker’s or Shanley’s. Even for New York, here was a girl who knew how to carry herself! One of these brokers, Alan Butler, who already had laid the first foundation of what was to be the fabulous Butler fortune, was fond of driving Ray, of a Sunday morning, along Fifth Avenue, past the reservoir at Forty-second Street, and on as far as Central Park, where an ordinance barred those alluring driveways to the danger of his horseless vehicle.

Owning one of the few motorcars in town, a curved-dash Duryea, which rattled unevenly over the cobblestones, these weekly excursions of Alan’s, which kept him perspiring over a complexity of pedals and levers to be operated simultaneously, were at best in the nature of adventure.

“Get a horse!” rose in ribaldry along the more or less harassed route of the itinerant motorist of those days.

“Alan, do you think it’s right to scare all the horses so?”

“It’s not my machine that is stopping traffic, it’s the girl I’ve got beside me!”

One Sunday evening, as Butler was driving her along the city streets, this conspicuous performance almost threatened to achieve her notoriety—in fact, did so, to the extent of her seeing herself in a news-item that appeared in the
New York Herald
the morning after the event: “Unknown Young Woman Leaps from Horseless Carriage of Wealthy Broker.”

They had been rumbling along late one evening in Butler’s Duryea, when suddenly the plump-faced youngish man turned into Sixteenth Street and drew up before a house as brown and as narrow as a prim-looking spinster.

There was something about this house, to Ray who had never seen it before, which struck at her consciousness as if cymbals had been hit, causing her to ring all over with quick apprehensions.

“Why are we stopping here, Butler?” she asked, and moved sharply to the far side of the seat, clutching the leather tufting as if she did not mean to be pried off.

“Ask me no questions, sweet, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“But I do ask. What do you want me to get out here for? It’s twelve o’clock. Take me home.”

They had been dining in what Butler called his club, a handsome house near the reservoir, where men and women in smart street and evening attire dined in a room brilliantly lighted with crystal chandeliers and frescoed in scenes of men with faunal feet and women wound chiefly in grapeleaves. Afterward the guests could repair to an equally brilliant and frescoed room, where there were tables for vingt-et-un, poker, baccarat, and a roulette wheel. Ray, who loved a game of chance, had won eighty dollars at roulette, on Butler’s stake of five. There had been wine, but chiefly out of deference to the house. Butler, already at forty under his physician’s orders, drank his allotment of one glass; Ray, with a characteristic lack of appetite for it, scarcely that. So he was not drunk, except that suddenly there was about Butler an air of intoxication that was frightening.

“Don’t you want a good time?”

“Take me home.”

“Come now, you’ve known your Uncle Fuller long enough to stop trying to pull his whiskers. One of the finest gals in this town runs things here. Ever been to this one?”

For answer she grasped the clutch, throwing it, and with a forward leap over the cobblestones the car began to rattle and quiver.

“Here you, are you crazy?” shouted Butler. “Take your hands off! Let go!”

“Then you take me home,” she said, pressing her foot on the first pedal within reach, and sending the car careening unevenly along the deserted street.

“That will be about enough of that four-flushing,” he said, red with rage, easily forcing her fingers free of the control and throwing her sharply to the opposite side of the seat. “You’re going to do as I say tonight, and without pretending or trying to make a ninny out of me.” And he began the precarious business of trying to turn his car in the middle of the block.

“I am, am I?” cried Ray, crazed, not so much by any sense of fear
or inability to outwit him, but rather by an overwhelming flood of dreariness that made sitting there beside him an instant longer, in the sordid pool of her predicament, out of the question. “I am, am I?” And then, just as the vehicle completed its turn and began its return rumble down the street, she jumped over its dashboard and down on the cobblestones.

It was one of those little midnight episodes common enough to city streets.

Plainly a man and a girl in a row; and while the girl picked herself up, the rotter, a swell, no doubt, rumbled away in his horseless carriage. Luckily the woman was unhurt, so it was unnecessary to pursue the horseless carriage, although one of the small group that seemed to spring out of nowhere, identified the disappearing conveyance as Alan Butler’s. A policeman jotted down the name she gave him in his notebook, just as if he did not know it to be a fictitious one, and told her she ought to be ashamed, a nice-appearing girl like her, and to hurry along home and behave herself.

Time and time again, subsequently helping her to realize what a poor thing her old vigorous zest had become, she was to find herself wishing that, miraculously, the girl who jumped from the horseless carriage that midnight had been lucky enough never to have bothered to rise again.

Once, in a poor inchoate way, she tried to convey some of this lusterlessness of her spirit to Miss Taddie Selcox, the only feminine connection she had formed during the years in New York. Their rooms, old-fashioned parlors in a defunct mansion, were separated only by folding doors. It was characteristic of their relationship that they never intruded upon each other by way of these doors, going, instead, the more formal way, around the hall.

Miss Selcox was a small girl with brown hair so kinky that it might have been removed from a mattress. This, added to the fact that she wore it in the elaborate fashion of the day, gave the top of her head somewhat the appearance of the elaborate layout of a summerresort hotel. The great center-puff was the hotel proper, the lesser puffs outlying bungalows and stables, the hills and dales and waving meadows formed by a process of apparently trying to wave the kinks.

There was little about her to indicate her stunning speed as a stenographer. On the contrary, she was the sort of girl who liked to curl up in a nest of the hand-worked pillows with which her room was strewn, and pick a string or two of a mandolin.

Other favorites that must have been lodged firmly in the timbers of the room occupied by Miss Selcox were, “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” “The Picture That Was Turned to the Wall,” “Two Little Girls in Blue,” “The Golden Hair Was Hanging Down Her Back,” and one of wailing persistency, called “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon.”

This last, so far as anyone was able to determine, applied literally where Miss Selcox was concerned. She was twenty-two, willing, personable, eager, but given to fits of depression.

“Too eager,” was Ray’s laconic summing-up of Miss Selcox.

“I wish I had some of your ginger about life,” Ray told her one evening, as she too lounged in the pillow nest of Taddie’s hot, gas-lighted room.

“Goodness knows what keeps me that way. It doesn’t get me anywhere. You have ten times the fun I do.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Ray, trying to keep down her general sense of nervousness—the terrible growing feeling that everything, including talk with this frizzed stenographer, was too futile to be endured. Was this the beginning of a nervous breakdown? Was nervous breakdown another phrase for crazy? A girl in Cincinnati had been obliged to stop high school and had been in a sanatorium ever since. They said she stuck pins in her wrists. Sometimes—even back there in high school—the thought of the beauty of putting oneself to death had entered one’s head! Stop such terrible thoughts! One must pull oneself together. Young
people were often in love with death, but not when you reached an age! Taddie was chattering—talking—

“I say it because it is true. In lots of ways you’re like my married sister,” pursued Taddie, making careful stitches along a small kidney-shaped bit of batiste. “My sister Carrie only needed to enter the room, to have every boy there behave like a black cat meowing on a back fence.”

“Why, Taddie, that’s not a nice thing to say!”

“Isn’t it?” she said, raising her unluminous eyes to Ray. “Now isn’t it funny? That’s just what’s the trouble with me. I don’t know enough to know why that’s not nice, but I can see that it’s not. It isn’t as if I’d said any cat, Ray. I said black, and that makes it kind of funny. Why isn’t it nice?”

“I don’t know, except that it isn’t!”

“You ought to know, because you’re just like Carrie, only more so.”

“What did it get her?”

“A husband, and a good one. Frank’s one of the finest. A steady good boy in his father’s cooperage business in Fredericktown. Carrie’s expecting. This is the sleeve of a baby-dress I’m making.”

“That’s more than it has got me.”

“Ray, this is a funny question for one girl to be asking another; and, in a way, rooming next to you, and hearing you come home to sleep every night, I guess I hadn’t ought to ask. But it’s some of the old hens around here. They think you’re fly. I know you think I’m a kind of silly, anyway, so I might as well out and ask what’s on my mind. Are you fly, Ray? Have you ever—would you ever—oh, you know what I mean—I know you’re not bad, or I’d never have been asking you to take rooms with me, but—would you—if a man—I just like to know things, Ray. I’ve been in this town five years now, but I’ve met fewer folks than I would have if I had stayed home in Fredericktown. How do you meet the kind of fellows who take you out to Parker’s for lunch, and riding around in horseless carriages? I just can’t seem to meet any men, except the deadheads who board here, and I wouldn’t waste time on them, even if they asked me.”

“The way I meet men, Taddie, is because most of them want to meet me. I can’t tell you why, since you’re just as good-looking as I am, perhaps better, any more than I can tell you just why it is my eyes are one color and yours are another.”

“You’ve got magnetism, that’s what it is.”

“Fudge, I’ve got something pretty cheap, whatever it is. I could go out and earn my living with it on the streets, I guess.”

“Why, Ray Schmidt!”

“Oh, I’m on to myself, Tad, and don’t you forget it. There is something cheap or snide or fifth-rate about me, or I wouldn’t find myself in the predicament that comes my way every once in a while. No, I’ve never slept with a man, if that’s what’s on your mind—”

“Ray—”

“I’m as much of a virgin as you are, if you call it being a virgin to arouse everything that is low and horrid in a man without meaning to. I don’t know what it is about me. I’m kind of common, I guess, Tad. Like good times. Like to gamble. Enjoy a horse race and can’t help it. Like clothes. Loud ones. That must be what misleads them. But what would you say if I was to say to you, Tad, that there is only one thing that ever happened to me in my life that really mattered to me much one way or the other, and that thing went the other?”

“You mean—a man—an affair?”

It was impossible not to think Tad silly-eyed, as her hands, with the bit of sewing, curved inward toward her breast and her gaze flew extreme northeast. Silly-eyed. Futile. Empty. Futile like everything. Like everybody. She must fight against this inertia. The desire never to have to lift her head off a pillow again. To sleep—sleep—sleep—Scat! There they came again, the thoughts that, sure as fate, would send you crazy if you did not throttle them down!

All around, as you sat in Taddie’s frilled-up back parlor, there were being lived in Blamey’s boardinghouse lives that seemed part of the general pattern of futility that was bearing down your spirit and your will to live. Where was the old mysterious impulse that gave even the doing of little things the illusion of being worthwhile? One now began the day with almost the feeling that to so
much as lift the hand required an initiative that was beyond you. One began the day wondering at the mysterious stream of vitality that impelled the futile boarders, in the futile city, to begin their lusterless rounds of routine. The self-deception was beyond the reach of your vitality. The deception that it mattered—mattered whether your egg lay cloyed and cold on your plate before you could muster up desire to lift a forkful—mattered whether you arrived among the dotted veilings and the cotton pansies of Ledbetter and Scape, or kept your appointment with Tom, the bookkeeper, Dick, the stockbroker, or Harry, the middle-aged of no known occupation—mattered whether you lunched at Parker’s, dined at the Astor House, or sat through what entertainment Tony Pastor’s had to offer. Opportunities that in the old days, when it was just the transient salesman or local fry, would have inflamed the anticipation.