Gaslight Sonatas Part 43

"Mighty hasty things."

She turned, then, plunging her hands into the great suds of feather bed, the whole thrust of her body toward him.

"'Hasty'! Is eight years hasty? Is eight years of buried-alive hasty? I'm goin', John Burkhardt; this time I'm goin' sure--sure as my name is Hanna Long."

"Goin' where, Hanna?"

"Goin' where each day ain't like a clod of mud on my coffin. Goin' where there's a chance for a woman like me to get a look-in on life before she's as skinny a hex at twenty-seven as old lady Scog--as--like this town's full of. I'm goin' to make my own livin' in my own way, and I'd like to see anybody try to stop me."

"I ain't tryin', Hanna."

She drew back in a flash of something like surprise.

"You're willin', then?"

"No, Hanna, not willin'."

"You can't keep me from it. Incompatibility is grounds!"

The fires of her rebellion, doused for the moment, broke out again, flaming in her cheeks.

He raised himself to his elbow, regarding her there in her flush, the white line of her throat whiter because of it. She was strangely, not inconsiderably taller.

"Why, Hanna, what you been doin' to yourself?"

Her hand flew to a new and elaborately piled coiffure, a half-fringe of curling-iron, little fluffed out tendrils escaping down her neck.

"In--incompatibility is grounds."

"It's mighty becomin', Hanna. Mighty becomin'."

"It's grounds, all right!"

"'Grounds'? Grounds for what, Hanna?"

She looked away, her throat distending as she swallowed.

"Divorce."

There was a pause, then so long that she had a sense of falling through its s.p.a.ce.

"Look at me, Hanna!"

She swung her gaze reluctantly to his. He was sitting erect now, a kind of pallor setting in behind the black beard.

"Leggo!" she said, loosening his tightening hand from her wrists. "Leggo; you hurt!"

"I--take it when a woman uses that word in her own home, she means it."

"This one does."

"You're a deacon's wife. Things--like this are--are pretty serious with people in our walk of life. We--'ain't learned in our communities yet not to take the marriage law as of G.o.d's own makin'. I'm a respected citizen here."

"So was Ed Bevins. It never hurt his hide."

"But it left her with a black name in the town."

"Who cares? She don't."

"It's no good to oppose a woman, Hanna, when she's made up her mind; but I'm willin' to meet you half-way on this thing. Suppose we try it again.

I got some plans for perkin' things up a bit between us. Say we join the Buckeye Bowling Club, and--"

"No! No! No! That gang of church-pillars! I can't stand it, I tell you; you mustn't try to keep me! You mustn't! I'm a rat in a trap here. Gimme a few dollars. Hundred and fifty is all I ask. Not even alimony. Lemme apply.

Gimme grounds. It's done every day. Lemme go. What's done can't be undone.

I'm not blamin' you. You're what you are and I'm what I am. I'm not blamin'

anybody. You're what you are, and G.o.d Almighty can't change you. Lemme go, John; for G.o.d's sake, lemme go!"

"Yes," he said, finally, not taking his eyes from her and the chin hardening so that it shot out and up. "Yes, Hanna; you're right. You got to go."

The skeleton of the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash.

Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein, Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place from the left, and on the right Stover's Vaudeville Agency for Lilliputians divides office-s.p.a.ce and rent with the Vibro Health Belt Company. It is a kind of murky drain, which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the leavings from Broadway. To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the p.r.i.c.k of a fraying collar. Even Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it. A _couturier's_ model gone hippy; a specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier's books gone over. Its shops are second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as sleight-of-hand. At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its family entrances. It is the cauldron of the city's eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. It is the home of the most daring all-night eating-places, the smallest store, the largest store, the greatest revolving stage, the dreariest night court, and the drabest night birds in the world.

War has laid its talons and scratched slightly beneath the surface of Sixth Avenue. Hufnagel's Delicatessen, the briny h.o.a.r of twenty years upon it, went suddenly into decline and the hands of a receiver. Recruiting stations have flung out imperious banners. Keeley's Chop-House--Open All Night--reluctantly swings its too hospitable doors to the one-o'clock-closing mandate.

To the New-Yorker whose nights must be filled with music, preferably jazz, to pa.s.s Keeley's and find it dark is much as if Bacchus, emulating the newest historical rogue, had donned ca.s.sock and hood. Even that half of the evening east of the cork-popping land of the midnight son has waned at Keeley's. No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners. There is a cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the something that is gone.

At twelve o'clock, five of near-Broadway's best breed, in woolly anklets and wristlets and a great shaking of curls, execute the poodle-prance to half the encores of other days. May Deland, whose ripple of hip and droop of eyelid are too subtle for censorship, walks through her hula-hula dance, much of her abandon abandoned. A pair of _apaches_ whirl for one hundred and twenty consecutive seconds to a great bang of cymbals and seventy-five dollars a week. At shortly before one Miss Hanna de Long, who renders ballads at one-hour intervals, rose from her table and companion in the obscure rear of the room, to finish the evening and her cycle with "Darling, Keep the Grate-Fire Burning," sung in a contralto calculated to file into no matter what din of midnight dining.

In something pink, silk, and conservatively V, she was a careful management's last bland ingredient to an evening that might leave too Cayenne a sting to the tongue.

At still something before one she had finished, and, without encore, returned to her table.

"Gawd!" she said, and leaned her head on her hand. "I better get me a job hollerin' down a well!"

Her companion drained his stemless gla.s.s with a sharp jerking back of the head. His was the short, stocky kind of a.s.surance which seemed to say, "Greater securities hath no man than mine, which are gilt-edged."

Obviously, Mr. Lew Kaminer clipped his coupons.

"Not so bad," he said. "The song ain't dead; the crowd is."

"Say, they can't hurt my feelin's. I been a chaser-act ever since I hit the town."

"Well, if I can sit and listen to a song in long skirts twelve runnin'

weeks, three or four nights every one of 'em, take it from me, there's a whistle in it somewhere."

"Just the same," she said, pushing away her gla.s.s, "my future in this business is behind me."

He regarded her, slumped slightly in his chair, celluloid toothpick dangling. There was something square about his face, abetted by a parted-in-the-middle toupee of great craftsmanship, which revealed itself only in the jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the brown of his own. There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight rotundity of his waistcoat.