 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
II
Mr. Moonlight Quill, mysterious, exotic, and oriental
in temperament was, nevertheless, a man of decision.
And it was with decision that he approached the problem
equal to the original cost of his entire stock—a step
which for certain private reasons he did not wish to take
—it would be impossible for him to continue in business
with the Moonlight Quill as before. There was but one
thing to do. He promptly turned his establishment
from an up-to-the-minute book-store into a second-hand
bookshop. The damaged books were marked down from
twenty-five to fifty per cent, the name over the door
whose serpentine embroidery had once shone so insolently
bright, was allowed to grow dim and take on the
indescribably vague color of old paint, and, having a
strong penchant for ceremonial, the proprietor even
went so far as to buy two skull-caps of shoddy red felt,
one for himself and one for his clerk, Merlin Grainger.
Moreover, he let his goatee grow until it resembled the
tail-feathers of an ancient sparrow and substituted for
a once dapper business suit a reverence-inspiring affair
of shiny alpaca.
In fact, within a year after Caroline's catastrophic
visit to the bookshop the only thing in it that preserved
any semblance of being up to date was Miss Masters.
Miss McCracken had followed in the footsteps of Mr.
Moonlight Quill and become an intolerable dowd.
For Merlin too, from a feeling compounded of loyalty
and listlessness, had let his exterior take on the semblance
of a deserted garden. He accepted the red felt skullcap
as a symbol of his decay. Always a young man
known as a "pusher," he had been, since the day of his
graduation from the manual training department of a
New York High School, an inveterate brusher of clothes,
hair, teeth, and even eyebrows, and had learned the
value of laying all his clean socks toe upon toe and heel
upon heel in a certain drawer of his bureau, which would
be known as the sock drawer.
These things, he felt, had won him his place in the
greatest splendor of the Moonlight Quill. It was due to
them that he was not still making "chests useful for
keeping things," as he was taught with breathless practicality
in High School, and selling them to whoever
had use of such chests—possibly undertakers. Nevertheless
when the progressive Moonlight Quill became
the retrogressive Moonlight Quill he preferred to sink
with it, and so took to letting his suits gather undisturbed
the wispy burdens of the air and to throwing his
socks indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear
drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not
uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his
clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without
having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished
bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite
magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering
with articles by successful authors against the frightful
impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying
of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, and the
fact that they preferred good investments in personal
jewelry to respectable ones in four per cent saving-banks.
It was indeed a strange state of affairs and a sorry
one for many worthy and God-fearing men. For the
first time in the history of the Republic almost any negro
north of Georgia could change a one-dollar bill. But
as at that time the cent was rapidly approaching the
purchasing power of the Chinese ubu and was only a
thing you got back occasionally after paying for a soft
drink, and could use merely in getting your correct
weight, this was perhaps not so strange a phenomenon
as it at first seems. It was too curious a state of things,
however, for Merlin Grainger to take the step that he
did take—the hazardous, almost involuntary step of
accepted him.
It was at Pulpat's on Saturday night and over a $1.75
bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal
occurred.
"Wine makes me feel all tingly, doesn't it you?"
chattered Miss Masters gaily.
"Yes," answered Merlin absently; and then, after a
long and pregnant pause: "Miss Masters—Olive—I
want to say something to you if you'll listen to me."
The tingliness of Miss Masters (who knew what was
coming) increased until it seemed that she would shortly
be electrocuted by her own nervous reactions. But her
"Yes, Merlin," came without a sign or flicker of interior
disturbance. Merlin swallowed a stray bit of air that
he found in his mouth.
"I have no fortune," he said with the manner of
making an announcement. "I have no fortune at all."
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy
and beautiful.
"Olive," he told her, "I love you."
"I love you too, Merlin," she answered simply.
"Shall we have another bottle of wine?"
"Yes," he cried, his heart beating at a great rate.
"Do you mean—"
"To drink to our engagement," she interrupted
bravely. "May it be a short one!"
"No!" he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely
down upon the table. "May it last forever!"
"What?"
"I mean—oh, I see what you mean. You're right.
May it be a short one." He laughed and added, "My
error."
After the wine arrived they discussed the matter
thoroughly.
"We'll have to take a small apartment at first," he
said, "and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there's a
small one in the house where I live, a big room and a
sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a
bath on the same floor."
She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how
pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face—
from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out
of true. She continued enthusiastically:
"And as soon as we can afford it we'll take a real swell
apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl."
"And after that a place in the country—and a car."
"I can't imagine nothing more fun. Can you?"
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that
he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear.
Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and
a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline's visit to
the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week
after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness
brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly
in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the
lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and
her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man
with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman
who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging
bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had
callously pulled down his shade.
No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising
in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in
a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below
the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a
green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be
rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage
with a wicker body that sagged to the left.
And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the
the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neoOlivian
period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would
tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much
face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two
spoons' length away:
"I knew you were going to say this to-night, Merlin.
I could see—"
She could see. Ah—suddenly he wondered how much
she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come
in with a party of three men and sat down at the next
table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could
she see that the men brought with them liquor far more
potent than Pulpat's red ink condensed threefold . . . ?
Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an
auditory ether Olive's low, soft monologue, as like a persistent
honey-bee she sucked sweetness from her memorable
hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of
ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry—
and that laughter of Caroline's that he knew so well
stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously
over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could
see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year
and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was
it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her
eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the
shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth
hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes
between his eyes and a row of books, when it was
twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided
no more.
And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in
her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine
cosmetic—that he could tell. She was making great
amusement for the young man on her left and the portly
her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked
and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation.
Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently
singing—
Don't cross the bridge 'til you're there—"
The portly person filled her glass with chill amber.
A waiter after several trips about the table, and many
helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a
cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this
dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an
order and hurried away. . . .
Olive was speaking to Merlin—
"When, then?" she asked, her voice faintly shaded
with disappointment. He realized that he had just
answered no to some question she had asked him.
"Oh, sometime."
"Don't you—care?"
A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought
his eyes back to her.
"As soon as possible, dear," he replied with surprising
tenderness. "In two months—in June."
"So soon?" Her delightful excitement quite took her
breath away.
"Oh, yes, I think we'd better say June. No use
waiting."
Olive began to pretend that two months was really
too short a time for her to make preparations. Wasn't
he a bad boy! Wasn't he impatient, though! Well,
she'd show him he mustn't be too quick with her. Indeed
he was so sudden she didn't exactly know whether
she ought to marry him at all.
"June," he repeated sternly.
Olive sighed and smiled and drank her coffee, her
little finger lifted high above the others in true refined
fashion. A stray thought came to Merlin that he would
like to buy five rings and throw at it.
"By gosh!" he exclaimed aloud. Soon he would be
putting rings on one of her fingers.
His eyes swung sharply to the right. The party of
four had become so riotous that the head-waiter had
approached and spoken to them. Caroline was arguing
with this head-waiter in a raised voice, a voice so clear
and young that it seemed as though the whole restaurant
would listen—the whole restaurant except Olive Masters,
self-absorbed in her new secret.
"How do you do?" Caroline was saying. "Probably
the handsomest head-waiter in captivity. Too much
noise? Very unfortunate. Something'll have to be
done about it. Gerald"—she addressed the man on her
right—"the head-waiter says there's too much noise.
Appeals to us to have it stopped. What'll I say?"
"Sh!" remonstrated Gerald, with laughter. "Sh!"
and Merlin heard him add in an undertone: "All the
bourgeoisie will be aroused. This is where the floorwalkers
learn French."
Caroline sat up straight in sudden alertness.
"Where's a floorwalker?" she cried. "Show me a
floorwalker." This seemed to amuse the party, for they
all, including Caroline, burst into renewed laughter.
The head-waiter, after a last conscientious but despairing
admonition, became Gallic with his shoulders and
retired into the background.
Pulpat's, as every one knows, has the unvarying respectability
of the table d'hôte. It is not a gay place
in the conventional sense. One comes, drinks the red
wine, talks perhaps a little more and a little louder than
It closes up at nine-thirty, tight as a drum; the policeman
is paid off and given an extra bottle of wine for the
missis, the coat-room girl hands her tips to the collector,
and then darkness crushes the little round tables
out of sight and life. But excitement was prepared for
Pulpat's this evening—excitement of no mean variety.
A girl with russet, purple-shadowed hair mounted to
her table-top and began to dance thereon.
"Sacré nom de Dieu! Come down off there!" cried the
head-waiter. "Stop that music!"
But the musicians were already playing so loud that
they could pretend not to hear his order; having once
been young, they played louder and gayer than ever, and
Caroline danced with grace and vivacity, her pink,
filmy dress swirling about her, her agile arms playing in
supple, tenuous gestures along the smoky air.
A group of Frenchmen at a table near by broke into
cries of applause, in which other parties joined—in a
moment the room was full of clapping and shouting;
half the diners were on their feet, crowding up, and on
the outskirts the hastily summoned proprietor was
giving indistinct vocal evidences of his desire to put an
end to this thing as quickly as possible.
". . . Merlin!" cried Olive, awake, aroused at
last; "she's such a wicked girl! Let's get out—now!"
The fascinated Merlin protested feebly that the check
was not paid.
"It's all right. Lay five dollars on the table. I
despise that girl. I can't bear to look at her." She was
on her feet now, tugging at Merlin's arm.
Helplessly, listlessly, and then with what amounted
to downright unwillingness, Merlin rose, followed Olive
dumbly as she picked her way through the delirious
clamor, now approaching its height and threatening to
took his coat and stumbled up half a dozen steps into
the moist April air outside, his ears still ringing with the
sound of light feet on the table and of laughter all about
and over the little world of the café. In silence they
walked along toward Fifth Avenue and a bus.
It was not until next day that she told him about the
wedding—how she had moved the date forward: it was
much better that they should be married on the first of
May.
| Tales of the jazz age | |