Just Around the Corner Part 7

Broadway was already alight; the cool spring air met them like tonic.

Like an exuberant lad, Mr. Chase led her to the curb. A huge, mahogany-colored touring-car, caparisoned in nickel and upholstered in a darker red, vibrated and snorted alongside. A chauffeur, with a striped rug across his knees, reached back respectfully and flung open the door.

Like an automaton Gertrude placed her small foot upon the step and paused, her dumfounded gaze confronting the equally stunned eyes of the chauffeur. Mr. Chase aided and encouraged at her elbow.

"It's all right, dearest, it's all right; this is your surprise."

"Why," she gasped, her eyes never leaving the steel-blue shaved face of the chauffeur--"why--I--"

Mr. Chase regarded her in some anxiety. "What a surprised little girl you are! I shouldn't have taken you so unawares." He almost lifted her in.

"This machine is yours, Mr. Chase?"

"Yes, dear, this machine is _ours_."

"You never told me anything."

"There is little to tell, Gertrude. I have not used my cars to amount to anything since I'm back from Egypt. I've been pretty busy with affairs."

"Back from Egypt!"

"Do not look so helpless, dear. I'm only back three months from a trip round the world, and I've been putting up with hotel life meanwhile.

Then I happened to meet you, and as long as you had me all sized up I just let it go--that's all, dear."

"You're not the Mr. Adam Chase who's had the rose suite on the tenth floor all winter?"

"That's me," he laughed.

Her slowly comprehending eyes did not leave his face.

"Why, I thought--I--you--"

"It was my use of the private elevator on the east side of the building that gave you the Sixth Avenue idea, and it was too good a joke on me to spoil, dearie."

She regarded him through blurry eyes.

"What must you think of me?"

He felt for her hand underneath the lap-robe.

"Among other things," he said, "I think that your eyes exactly match the violets I motored out to get for you this morning at my place ten miles up the Hudson."

"When did you go, dear?"

"Before you were up. We were back before ten, in spite of a spark-plug that gave us some trouble."

"Oh," she said.

The figure at the wheel squirmed to be off. She lay back faint against the upholstery.

"To think," she said, "that you should care for me!"

"My own dear girl!"

He touched a spring and the back of her seat reclined like a Morris chair.

"Lie back, dear. I invented that scheme so I can recline at night and watch the stars parade past. I toured that way all through Egypt."

The figure in the front seat gripped his wheel.

"Where are we going, Adam dear?" she whispered.

"This is your night, Gertrude; give James your orders."

She snuggled deeper into the dark-red upholstery, and their hands clasped closer beneath the robe.

"James," she said, in a voice like a bell, "take us to the Vista for dinner; afterward motor out along the Palisade drive, far out so that we can see the Hudson by moonlight."

OTHER PEOPLE'S SHOES

At the close of a grilling summer that had sapped the life from the city as insidiously as fever runs through veins and licks them up--at the close of a day that had bleached the streets as dry as desert bones--Abe Ginsburg closed his store half an hour earlier than usual because his clerk, Miss Ruby Cohn, was enjoying a two days' vacation at the Long Island Recreation Farm, and because a staggering pain behind his eyes and zigzag down the back of his neck to his left shoulder-blade made the shelves of shoe-boxes appear as if they were wavering with the heat-dance of the atmosphere and ready to cast their neatly arranged stock in a hopeless fuddle on the center of the floor.

Up-stairs, on an exact level with the elevated trains that tore past the kitchen windows like speed monsters annihilating distance, Mrs. Ginsburg poised a pie-pan aloft on the tips of five fingers and waltzed a knife round the rim of the tin. A ragged ruffle of dough swung for a moment; she snipped it off, leaving the pie pat and sleek.

Then Mrs. Ginsburg smiled until a too perfect row of badly executed teeth showed their pink rubber gums, leaned over the delicate lid of the pie, and with a three-p.r.o.nged fork p.r.i.c.ked out the doughy inscription--ABE. Sarah baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors had no more gracious zeal.

The waiting oven filled the kitchen with its ga.s.sy breath; a train hurtled by and rattled the chandeliers, a stack of plates on a shelf, and a blue-gla.s.s vase on the parlor mantel. A buzz-bell rang three staccato times. Mrs. Ginsburg placed the pie on the table-edge and hurried down a black aisle of hallway.

Book-agents, harbingers of a dozen-cabinet-photographs-colored-crayon-thrown-in, and their kin have all combined to make wary the gentle cliff-dweller. Mrs. Ginsburg opened her door just wide enough to insert a narrow pencil, placed the tip of her shoe in the aperture, and leaned her face against the jamb so that from without half an eye burned through the crack.

"Abie? It ain't you, is it, Abie?"

"Don't get excited, mamma!"

"It ain't six o'clock yet, Abie--something ain't right with you!"

"Don't get excited, mamma! I just closed early for the heat. For what should I keep open when a patent-leather shoe burns a hole in your hand?"

"_Ach_, such a scare as you give me! If I'd 'a' known it I could have had supper ready. It wouldn't hurt you to call up-stairs when you close early--no consideration that boy has got for his mother! Poor papa! If he so much as closed the store ten minutes earlier he used to call up for me to heat the things--no consideration that boy has got for his old mother!"

Mr. Ginsburg placed a heavy hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kissed her while the words were unfinished and smoking on her lips.

"It's too hot to eat, mamma. Ain't I asked you every night during this heat not to cook so much?"

"Just the same, when it comes to the table I see you eat. I never see you refuse nothing--I bet you come twice for apple-pie to-night. Is the hall table the place for your cuffs, Abie? I'm ashamed for the people the way my house looks when you're home--no order that boy has got! I go now and put my pie in the oven."