 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
III
And married they were, in a somewhat stuffy manner,
under the chandelier of the flat where Olive lived with
her mother. After marriage came elation, and then,
gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended
upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his
thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep
them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments
the evidence that they were.
It was decided after several weeks of disastrous and
well-nigh humiliating experiments with restaurants that
they would join the great army of the delicatessen-fed,
so he took up his old way of life again, in that he stopped
every evening at Braegdort's delicatessen and bought potatoes
in salad, ham in slices, and sometimes even stuffed
tomatoes in bursts of extravagance.
Then he would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway,
and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered
by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The
hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of
the furniture polish in vogue when "Adam-and-Eve"
Bryan ran against William McKinley, of portières an
ounce heavier with dust, from worn-out shoes and lint
from dresses turned long since into patch-work quilts.
and made poignant at each landing by the aura of contemporary
cooking, then, as he began the next flight,
diminishing into the odor of the dead routine of dead
generations.
Eventually would occur the door of his room, which
slipped open with indecent willingness and closed with
almost a sniff upon his "Hello, dear! Got a treat for
you to-night."
Olive, who always rode home on the bus to "get a
morsel of air," would be making the bed and hanging up
things. At his call she would come up to him and give
him a quick kiss with wide-open eyes, while he held her
upright like a ladder, his hands on her two arms, as
though she were a thing without equilibrium, and would,
once he relinquished hold, fall stiffly backward to the
floor. This is the kiss that comes in with the second
year of marriage, succeeding the bridegroom kiss (which
is rather stagey at best, say those who know about such
things, and apt to be copied from passionate movies).
Then came supper, and after that they went out for a
walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes
to a moving picture, which taught them patiently
that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered,
and that something very grand and brave and
beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile
and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away
from pleasure.
Such was their day for three years. Then change
came into their lives: Olive had a baby, and as a result
Merlin had a new influx of material resources. In the
third week of Olive's confinement, after an hour of nervous
rehearsing, he went into the office of Mr. Moonlight
Quill and demanded an enormous increase in
salary.
"I've been here ten years," he said; "since I was
nineteen. I've always tried to do my best in the interests
of the business."
Mr. Moonlight Quill said that he would think it over.
Next morning he announced, to Merlin's great delight,
that he was going to put into effect a project long premeditated—he
was going to retire from active work in
the bookshop, confining himself to periodic visits and
leaving Merlin as manager with a salary of fifty dollars
a week and a one-tenth interest in the business. When
the old man finished, Merlin's cheeks were glowing and
his eyes full of tears. He seized his employer's hand and
shook it violently, saying over and over again:
"It's very nice of you, sir. It's very white of you.
It's very, very nice of you."
So after ten years of faithful work in the store he had
won out at last. Looking back, he saw his own progress
toward this hill of elation no longer as a sometimes
sordid and always gray decade of worry and failing enthusiasm
and failing dreams, years when the moonlight
had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had
faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant
climb over obstacles which he had determinedly
surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic
self-delusion that had kept him from misery was
seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution.
Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight
Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness
he had stayed on. Strangely enough he
now thought that those were times when he had exerted
tremendous persistence and had "determined" to fight
it out where he was.
At any rate, let us not for this moment begrudge
Merlin his new and magnificent view of himself. He
had arrived. At thirty he had reached a post of importance.
invested every penny in his pocket in the most tremendous
feast that Braegdort's delicatessen offered, and
staggered homeward with the great news and four gigantic
paper bags. The fact that Olive was too sick to
eat, that he made himself faintly but unmistakably ill
by a struggle with four stuffed tomatoes, and that most
of the food deteriorated rapidly in an iceless ice-box all
next day did not mar the occasion. For the first time
since the week of his marriage Merlin Grainer lived
under a sky of unclouded tranquillity.
The baby boy was christened Arthur, and life became
dignified, significant, and, at length, centered. Merlin
and Olive resigned themselves to a somewhat secondary
place in their own cosmos; but what they lost in personality
they regained in a sort of primordial pride.
The country house did not come, but a month in an
Asbury Park boarding-house each summer filled the
gap; and during Merlin's two weeks' holiday this excursion
assumed the air of a really merry jaunt—especially
when, with the baby asleep in a wide room opening technically
on the sea, Merlin strolled with Olive along the
thronged board-walk puffing at his cigar and trying to
look like twenty thousand a year.
With some alarm at the slowing up of the days and
the accelerating of the years, Merlin became thirty-one,
thirty-two—then almost with a rush arrived at that
age which, with all its washing and panning, can only
muster a bare handful of the precious stuff of youth: he
became thirty-five. And one day on Fifth Avenue he
saw Caroline.
It was Sunday, a radiant, flowerful Easter morning
and the avenue was a pageant of lilies and cutaways
and happy April-colored bonnets. Twelve o'clock: the
great churches were letting out their people—St. Simon's,
doors like wide mouths until the people pouring forth
surely resembled happy laughter as they met and
strolled and chattered, or else waved white bouquets at
waiting chauffeurs.
In front of the Church of the Epistles stood its twelve
vestrymen, carrying out the time-honored custom of
giving away Easter eggs full of face-powder to the
church-going débutantes of the year. Around them
delightedly danced the two thousand miraculously
groomed children of the very rich, correctly cute and
curled, shining like sparkling little jewels upon their
mothers' fingers. Speaks the sentimentalist for the
children of the poor? Ah, but the children of the rich,
laundered, sweet-smelling, complexioned of the country,
and, above all, with soft, in-door voices.
Little Arthur was five, child of the middle class. Undistinguished,
unnoticed, with a nose that forever
marred what Grecian yearnings his features might have
had, he held tightly to his mother's warm, sticky hand,
and, with Merlin on his other side, moved upon the
home-coming throng. At Fifty-third Street, where
there were two churches, the congestion was at its thickest,
its richest. Their progress was of necessity retarded
to such an extent that even little Arthur had not the
slightest difficulty in keeping up. Then it was that
Merlin perceived an open landaulet of deepest crimson,
with handsome nickel trimmings, glide slowly up to
the curb and come to a stop. In it sat Caroline.
She was dressed in black, a tight-fitting gown trimmed
with lavender, flowered at the waist with a corsage of
orchids. Merlin started and then gazed at her fearfully.
For the first time in the eight years since his
marriage he was encountering the girl again. But a girl
no longer. Her figure was slim as ever—or perhaps
adolescence, had gone the way of the first blooming
of her cheeks. But she was beautiful; dignity was
there now, and the charming lines of a fortuitous nine-and-twenty;
and she sat in the car with such perfect
appropriateness and self-possession that it made him
breathless to watch her.
Suddenly she smiled—the smile of old, bright as that
very Easter and its flowers, mellower than ever—yet
somehow with not quite the radiance and infinite promise
of that first smile back there in the bookshop nine
years before. It was a steelier smile, disillusioned
and sad.
But it was soft enough and smile enough to make a
pair of young men in cutaway coats hurry over, to pull
their high hats off their wetted, iridescent hair; to bring
them, flustered and bowing, to the edge of her landaulet,
where her lavender gloves gently touched their gray
ones. And these two were presently joined by another,
and then two more, until there was a rapidly swelling
crowd around the landaulet. Merlin would hear a
young man beside him say to his perhaps well-favored
companion:
"If you'll just pardon me a moment, there's some one
I have to speak to. Walk right ahead. I'll catch up."
Within three minutes every inch of the landaulet,
front, back, and side, was occupied by a man—a man
trying to construct a sentence clever enough to find its
way to Caroline through the stream of conversation.
Luckily for Merlin a portion of little Arthur's clothing
had chosen the opportunity to threaten a collapse, and
Olive had hurriedly rushed him over against a building
for some extemporaneous repair work, so Merlin was
able to watch, unhindered, the salon in the street.
The crowd swelled. A row formed in back of the first,
from a black bouquet, sat Caroline enthroned in her
obliterated car, nodding and crying salutations and
smiling with such true happiness that, of a sudden, a
new relay of gentlemen had left their wives and consorts
and were striding toward her.
The crowd, now phalanx deep, began to be augmented
by the merely curious; men of all ages who could not
possibly have known Caroline jostled over and melted
into the circle of ever-increasing diameter, until the lady
in lavender was the centre of a vast impromptu auditorium.
All about her were faces—clean-shaven, bewhiskered,
old, young, ageless, and now, here and there, a woman.
The mass was rapidly spreading to the opposite curb,
and, as St. Anthony's around the corner let out its
box-holders, it overflowed to the sidewalk and crushed
up against the iron picket-fence of a millionaire across
the street. The motors speeding along the avenue were
compelled to stop, and in a jiffy were piled three, five,
and six deep at the edge of the crowd; auto-busses, top-heavy
turtles of traffic, plunged into the jam, their
passengers crowding to the edges of the roofs in wild
excitement and peering down into the centre of the
mass, which presently could hardly be seen from the
mass's edge.
The crush had become terrific. No fashionable audience
at a Yale-Princeton football game, no damp mob
at a world's series, could be compared with the panoply
that talked, stared, laughed, and honked about the
lady in black and lavender. It was stupendous; it was
terrible. A quarter mile down the block a half-frantic
policeman called his precinct; on the same corner a
frightened civilian crashed in the glass of a fire-alarm
and sent in a wild pæan for all the fire-engines of the
a hysterical old maid telephoned in turn for the prohibition
enforcement agent, the special deputies on Bolshevism,
and the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital.
The noise increased. The first fire-engine arrived,
filling the Sunday air with smoke, clanging and crying
a brazen, metallic message down the high, resounding
walls. In the notion that some terrible calamity had
overtaken the city, two excited deacons ordered special
services immediately and set tolling the great bells of St.
Hilda's and St. Anthony's, presently joined by the jealous
gongs of St. Simon's and the Church of the Epistles.
Even far off in the Hudson and the East River the sounds
of the commotion were heard, and the ferry-boats and
tugs and ocean liners set up sirens and whistles that
sailed in melancholy cadence, now varied, now reiterated,
across the whole diagonal width of the city from Riverside
Drive to the gray water-fronts of the lower East
Side. . . .
In the centre of her landaulet sat the lady in black
and lavender, chatting pleasantly first with one, then
with another of that fortunate few in cutaways who had
found their way to speaking distance in the first rush.
After a while she glanced around her and beside her
with a look of growing annoyance.
She yawned and asked the man nearest her if he
couldn't run in somewhere and get her a glass of water.
The man apologized in some embarrassment. He could
not have moved hand or foot. He could not have
scratched his own ear. . . .
As the first blast of the river sirens keened along the
air, Olive fastened the last safety-pin in little Arthur's
rompers and looked up. Merlin saw her start, stiffen
slowly like hardening stucco, and then give a little gasp
of surprise and disapproval.
"That woman," she cried suddenly. "Oh!"
She flashed a glance at Merlin that mingled reproach
and pain, and without another word gathered up little
Arthur with one hand, grasped her husband by the
other, and darted amazingly in a winding, bumping canter
through the crowd. Somehow people gave way before
her; somehow she managed to retain her grasp on
her son and husband; somehow she managed to emerge
two blocks up, battered and dishevelled, into an open
space, and, without slowing up her pace, darted down a
side-street. Then at last, when uproar had died away
into a dim and distant clamor, did she come to a walk
and set little Arthur upon his feet.
"And on Sunday, too! Hasn't she disgraced herself
enough?" This was her only comment. She said it
to Arthur, as she seemed to address her remarks to Arthur
throughout the remainder of the day. For some curious
and esoteric reason she had never once looked at
her husband during the entire retreat.
| Tales of the jazz age | |