Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 76

"You can't pump that into me, Blink."

His voice narrowed to a nasal quality. "I didn't send her and the kid a whole Christmas box like you wanted me to, did I? I didn't stick a brand-new fiver in the black-silk-dress pattern, knowing all the while she'd have it drunk up before she opened the creases out. I didn't, did I?"

They were approaching the intersection of a wide and white-lighted cross-town street. The snowfall had lightened. Marjorie Clark let her gaze rest for the moment upon her companion, and her voice seemed suddenly to nestle deep in her throat.

"Gee! Blink, if I thought any of the--the uplift stuff I've tried to pump into you had seeped in. Gee! if I could think that, Blink!"

Tears lay close to the surface of her words, and his lean face was thrust farther forward in affirmation.

"It has, Marj. All I got to do is to think of you and those big black eyes of yours s.h.i.+ning, and I could lead a water-wagon parade."

"It's the habits, Blink, you got to watch most. For a minute to-night you looked like c.o.ke and--and it scared me. Don't let the c.o.ke get you, Blink. For G.o.d's sake, don't!"

"I sent her a fiver, Marj, and a black silk, and a doll with real hair for the kid. Y'oughtta seen, Marj, real hair on it."

"That was fine, Blink. Fine!"

"Where you going? Aw, come, Marj. For the love of Mike, you're not going."

"Yes, yes. I got to go. This is Twenty-second Street, my corner. That's where I room; that fourth house to the right. That dark one. I got to go."

"Where?"

"Where do you s'pose? Home."

"What's doin' there?"

"N-nothing."

"Whatta you going to do Christmas Eve? Sit in your two-by-four and twiddle your thumbs?"

Immediate sobs rose in her throat. "Lord!" she said, "I dun'no'! I dun'no'!"

He set up the jangling again. "It's Christmas Eve, Marj."

"That's right, rub it in," and looked away from him.

"Come, Marj, don't leave me high and dry like this. Come, I'll blow you to a little supper, kiddo. I got a couple of meal tickets coming to me down at Harry's on some ivories I threw last night."

"Dice! And after the line of talk you just tried to make me swallow. Did I believe it? I did not!"

"No stakes, Marj. Just for a couple of meal tickets we tossed. Come, girl, you 'ain't been down to Harry's for months; you won't get your halo mussed from one time. It's Christmas Eve, Marj."

"I heard you the first time."

"If I got to go it alone to-night, Marj, it'll be the wettest Christmas I ever spent, it will. I'll pickle this Christmas Eve like it was never pickled before, I will."

"Aren't you no man at all, threatening like that? Just no man at all?"

"I tell you if I got to go it alone to-night, I won't be. I'm crazy enough to tear things wide open."

"A line of talk like that will send me home quicker than anything, if you want to know it." She turned her face away and toward the dark aisle of the side street.

"I didn't mean it, Marj."

"I hate whining."

"Don't go, girl. Don't. Don't give me the horrors and leave me alone to-night, Marj."

She moved slowly into the gloom of the cross-town street. Solemn rows of blank-faced houses flanked it. Wind slewed as through a canon, whistling in high pitch.

"Gee!"

"Fine little joy lane for your Christmas Eve, eh? Don't go, Marj. Have a heart and be a sport. Let me blow you to a supper down at Harry's for old times' sake. Didn't you promise my old woman to keep an eye on me?

Didn't you? For old times' sake, Marj. It's Christmas."

She stood s.h.i.+vering and gazing down into the black throat of the street.

"It'll be a merry evening in that two-by-four of yours, won't it? Look at it down there. Cheerful, ain't it?"

Tears formed in a glaze over her eyes.

"Be a sport, Marj."

"All right--Blink!"

At the family entrance to Harry's place, and just around the corner from the main entrance of knee-high swinging doors and a broadside of frosted plate-gla.s.s front, a bead of gas burned sullenly through a red globe, winking, so to speak, at all who would enter there under cover of its murk.

Women with faces the fatty white of jade, and lips that might have kissed blood, slipped from the dark tide of the side street into the entrance. Furtive couples rose out of the night: the men, lean as laths, collars turned up and caps drawn down; girls, some with red lights and some with no lights in their eyes, and most of them with too red lips of too few curves, and all of them with chalk-colored powder laid on over the golden pollen of youth.

Within Harry's place, Christmas found little enough berth except that above the great soaped-over mirror at the far end of the room a holly wreath dangled from the tarnished gilt frame and against the clouded-over gla.s.s a forefinger had etched a careless Merry Christmas.

At tables set so close that waiters side-stepped between them, the habitues of Harry's place dined--wined, too, but mostly out of uncovered steins or two-inch stemless gla.s.ses. And here and there at smaller tables a solitary figure with a seer's light in his eyes sipped his greenish milk!

An electric piano, its shallow tones undigested by the crowded room, played in response to whomsoever slipped a coin into its maw. Kicked-up sawdust lay in the air like flakes.

From her table near the door Miss Marjorie Clark pushed from her a litter of half-tasted dishes and sent her dark glance out over the room.

A few pairs of too sinuous dancers circled a small clearing around the electric piano. Waiters with fans of foam-drifting steins clutched between fingers jostled them in pa.s.sing. At a small table adjoining, a girl slept in her arms. Two more entered, elbow in elbow, and directly a youth in a wide-striped wool sweater m.u.f.fled high to his teeth, and features that in spite of himself would twitch and twitch again.

"Hi, Blink," he said in pa.s.sing.

"Hi."

Reader, your heart lifted up and glowing with Yuletide and good-will toward men, turn not in warranted nausea from the reek of Harry's place. Mere plants can love the light and turn to it, but have not the beautiful mercy to share their loveliness with foul places. The human heart is a finer work. It can, if it will, turn its white light upon darkness, so that out of it even a single seed may take heart and grow.

A fastidious olfactory nerve has no right to dominion over the quality of mercy. The heart should keep its thousand doors all open, each heart-string a latch-string, and each latch-string out.