Gaslight Sonatas Part 2

"Aw now--Gert!"

"I know it, Jimmie--that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."

"Aw now--Gert!"

"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty common. I know it's common for a girl to--to come to a fellow like this, but--but I haven't got any shame about it--I haven't got anything, Jimmie, except fight for--for what's eating me. And the way things are between us now is eating me."

"I--Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."

"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."

"I understand, Gert, but--"

"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while living to me because I could see the day, even if we--you--never talked about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to--to the kind of a fellow would want to settle down to making a little--two-by-four home for us. A--little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and--"

"For G.o.d's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to--"

"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four weeks that you didn't see me coming first."

"But not now, Gert. I--"

"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And--and it hurts, this does. G.o.d! how it hurts!"

He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight collar.

"I--never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."

"May Scully can't give it to you--her and her fast crowd."

"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."

"Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you."

"That's for her to decide, not you."

"I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and--"

"Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to clear, and quick, too. G.o.d! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of you!"

"If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this and--"

"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."

"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey.

It--it's only my--my fear that I'm losing you, and--and my hate for the every-day grind of things, and--"

"I can't help that, can I?"

"Why, there--there's nothing on G.o.d's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate that Bargain-Bas.e.m.e.nt. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've spent the best years of my life, I--I wanna die. The day I get out of it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I--I'll never put my foot below sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a walk in my own gold-mine."

"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."

"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on the gla.s.s sidewalk up over me. Oh. G.o.d! you dunno--you dunno!"

"When it comes to that the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream, or a fellow's, for that matter."

"With a man it's different, It's his job in life, earning, and--and the woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us, why--why--I--why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's n.o.body could run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter in.

I--Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by step!

Don't, Jimmie!"

"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better 'n me."

"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you, temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store b.u.m, honey. It's only you 'ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar windfall and--a--and a sporty girl. If--if two gla.s.ses of beer make you as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you under the table for life."

"Aw-there you go again!"

"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a fellow had what's he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie.

"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but--"

"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't even know yourself."

"I never set myself up to n.o.body for anything I wasn't."

"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street gang that time, and--"

"You!"

"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how much I--I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how I--I love you, Jimmie.

Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here and lay herself this low to you--"

"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."

"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of. Us two, Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Sat.u.r.day nights.

Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and things.

Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"

Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the newspaper into a rear pocket.

"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see her to her feet.

Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her head was up, and her hand, where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in a vise that tightened with each block.

You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the easy refuge of the cla.s.sics, suffer you the shuddering a.n.a.logy that between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a sistership which rounds them, like a la.s.so thrown back into time, into one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.

True, Gertie Slayback's _mise en scene_ was a two-room kitchenette apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor's farthest point between two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced forays down into a packing-case. But there was that in her eyes which witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror. Hers was actually the t.i.tillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its wings, that surrender can be so sweet.

Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying a hammer, then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch, red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.