Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 15

He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."

"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."

"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first--a pair of carpet slippers and a patent rocker."

"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."

"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."

"I--I just can't get over it, Phonzie, you _forty_! You five years older than me and me afraid--thinking all along it was just the other way."

"I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam."

"Whatta you know about that!"

"Ask Gert. She's been following me around from place to place for years, sticking to me because I say there ain't a model in the business can show the clothes like she can."

"Yes?"

"Ask her; she's my age and we been on the job together for twenty years.

Long before live models was even known in the business, she and me were showing goods in the old Cunningham place on Madison Avenue."

"Even--even back there you was dead set on having good figures around the place, wasn't you, Phonzie?"

"I tell you it's economy in the end, madam, to have figures that can show off the goods to advantage."

"Oh, I'm not kicking, Phonzie, but I was just saying."

"I have been in the business long enough, madam, to learn that the greatest way in the world to show gowns is on live stock. A dame will fall for any sort of a rag stuck on a figure like Gert's, and think the waist-line and all is thrown in with the dress. You seen for yourself Van Ness order five gowns right off Gert's back to-day. Would she have fallen for them if we had shown them in the hand? Not much! She forgot all about her own thirty-eight waist-line when she ordered that pink organdie. She was seeing Gert's twenty-two inches."

"But honest, Phonzie, take a girl like Gert, even with her figure, she--Oh, I don't know, there's something about her!"

"She may rub your fur the wrong way, madam, but under all her flip ways they don't come no finer than Gert."

"No, it ain't that, only she don't always get across. Take Lipton; she won't even let her show her a gown; she's always calling for Dodo instead. Sometimes I think the trade takes exceptions to a girl like Gert, her all decked out in diamonds that--show how--how fly she must be."

"Gertie Dobriner's the best in the business, just the same, madam. She ain't stuck on her way of living no more than I am, but she's a model and she 'ain't got enough of anything else in her to make the world treat her any different than a model."

"I'm not saying she ain't a good thirty-six, Phonzie."

"I got to hand it to her, madam, when it comes to a lot of things. She may be a little skylarker, but take it from me, it ain't from choice, and when she likes you--G.o.d! honest, I think that girl would p.a.w.n her soul for you. When I was down with pneumonia--"

"I ain't saying a thing against her."

"She's no saint, maybe, but then G.o.d knows I'm not, either, and what I don't know about her private life don't bother me."

"Oh, I--I know you like her all right."

"Say, I'll bet you any amount if that girl had memory enough to learn the words of a song or the steps of a dance, she could have landed a first-row job in any musical show on Broadway. She could do it now, for that matter. Gad! did you see her to-day showing off that Queen Louise cloth-of-gold model? Honest, she took my breath away, and I been on the floor with her twenty years."

"Y-yes."

"Keep down your hips and waist-line, Gert, I always say to her, and you are good in the business for ten years yet."

"She should worry while the crop of four carats is good."

"Yes, but just the same a girl like her don't know when her luck may turn. A girl can lose her luck sometimes before she loses her figure."

"Any old time she can lose her luck with you."

"Me!"

"Yes, you!"

Madam Moores bent over the pleats in her napkin. Opposite her, his cigarette held fastidiously aloft, he regarded her through its haze.

"Well, of all things! So that--that's what you think?"

"I--I know."

"Know what?"

"That she's dead strong for you."

"Sure she is, but what's that got to do with it? That girl's like--well, she's like a sister or--or a pal to me, but she's got about as much time for a fellow of my pace, except when she gets blue, as--as the Queen of Sheba has."

"That's what you think, maybe, but everybody else knows she--she's been after you for years, trying--"

"Aw, cut the comedy, madam. Honest, you make me sore. She's nothing to me off the floor but a darn good pal. Say, I can treat her to a sixty-cent table d'hote twice a week; but don't you think in the back of my head, when it comes to a showdown, that I couldn't even buy silk shoelaces for a girl of her kind. I ain't her pace and we both know it.

Bosh!"

"You'd like to be, all right, if--if she didn't have so many rich ones hanging around."

"Just the same, many's the time she's told me if she could land a regular fellow and do the regular thing and settle down on seventy-five a month in a Harlem flat, why she'd drop all this skylarking of hers for a family of youngsters, so quick it would make your head swim."

"Sure, that's just what I say, she--"

"Many's the time she--she's cried to me--just cried, because the kind of life she has to live don't lead to anything, and she knows it."

"I ain't blaming you for liking her, Phonzie; a girl with her figure can make an old dub like me look like--well, I just guess after her I--I must look like thirty cents to you."

"You! Say, you got more real sense in your little finger than three of Gert's kind put together."

She colored like a wild rose.

"Sense ain't what counts with the men nowadays; it's looks and--and speed like Gert's."

"Girls like Gert are all right, I tell you; but say, when it comes to real brains like yours--n.o.body home."