Gaslight Sonatas Part 46

"Sure!"

"Lew--will you--are you--you ain't kiddin' me all these weeks? Taxicabbin'

me all night in the Park and--drinkin' around this way all the time together. You 'ain't been kiddin' me, Lew?"

He shot up his cigar to an oblique.

"Now you're shoutin'!" he repeated. "It took three months to get you down off your high horse, but now we're talkin' the same language."

"Lew!"

"It ain't every girl I take up with; just let that sink in. I like 'em frisky, but I like 'em cautious. That's where you made a hit with me.

Little of both. Them that nibble too easy ain't worth the catch."

She reached out the other hand, covering his with her both.

"You're--talkin' weddin'-bells, Lew?"

He regarded her, the ash of his cigar falling and scattering down his waistcoat.

"What bells?"

"Weddin', Lew." Her voice was as thin as a reed.

"O Lord!" he said, pus.h.i.+ng back slightly from the table. "Have another fizz, girl, and by that time we'll be ready for a trip in my underground balloon. Waiter!"

She drew down his arm, quickly restraining it. She was not so sure now of controlling the muscles of her mouth.

"Lew!"

"Now--now--"

"Please, Lew! It's what kept me alive. Thinkin' you meant that. Please, Lew! You ain't goin' to turn out like all the rest in this town? You--the first fellow I ever went as far as--last night with. I'll stand by you, Lew, through thick and thin. You stand by me. You make it right with me, Lew, and--"

He cast a quick glance about, grasped at the sides of the table, and leaned toward her, _sotto_.

"For G.o.d's sake, hus.h.!.+ Are you crazy?"

"No," she said, letting the tears roll down over the too frank gyrations of her face--"no, I ain't crazy. I only want you to do the right thing by me, Lew. I'm--blue. I'm crazy afraid of the bigness of this town. There ain't a week I don't expect my notice here. It's got me. If you been stringin' me along like the rest of 'em, and I can't see nothing ahead of me but the struggle for a new job--and the tryin' to buck up against what a decent girl has got to--"

"Why, you're crazy with the heat, girl! I thought you and me was talking the same language. I want to do the right thing by you. Sure I do! Anything in reason is yours for the askin'. That's what I been comin' to."

"Then, Lew, I want you to do by me like you'd want your sister done by."

"I tell you you're crazy. You been hitting up too many fizzes lately."

"I--"

"You ain't fool enough to think I'm what you'd call a free man? I don't bring my family matters down here to air 'em over with you girls. You're darn lucky that I like you well enough to--well, that I like you as much as I do. Come, now; tell you what I'm goin' to do for you: You name your idea of what you want in the way of--"

"O G.o.d! Why don't I die? I ain't fit for nothing else!"

He cast a glance around their deserted edge of the room. A waiter, painstakingly oblivious, stood two tables back.

"Wouldn't I be better off out of it? Why don't I die?"

He was trembling down with a suppression of rage and concern for the rising gale in her voice.

"You can't make a scene in public with me and get away with it. If that's your game, it won't land you anywhere. Stop it! Stop it now and talk sense, or I'll get up. By G.o.d! if you get noisy, I'll get up and leave you here with the whole place givin' you the laugh. You can't throw a scare in me."

But Miss de Long's voice and tears had burst the dam of control. There was an outburst that rose and broke on a wave of hysteria.

"Lemme die--that's all I ask! What's there in it for me? What has there ever been? Don't do it, Lew! Don't--don't!"

It was then Mr. Kaminer pushed back his chair, flopped down his napkin, and rose, breathing heavily enough, but his face set in an exaggerated kind of quietude as he moved through the maze of tables, exchanged a check for his hat, and walked out.

For a stunned five minutes her tears, as it were, seared, she sat after him.

The waiter had withdrawn to the extreme left of the deserted edge of the room, talking behind his hand to two colleagues in servility, their faces listening and breaking into smiles.

Finally Miss de Long rose, moving through the zigzag paths of empty tables toward a deserted dressing-room. In there she slid into black-velvet slippers and a dark-blue walking-skirt, pulled on over the pink silk, tucking it up around the waist so that it did not sag from beneath the hem, squirmed into a black-velvet jacket with a false d.i.c.ky made to emulate a blouse-front, and a blue-velvet hat hung with a curtain-like purple face-veil.

As she went out the side, Keeley's was closing its front doors.

Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance. How insidious is an old scent! It can creep into the heart like an ache. Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk? Dear, silenced laughs can come back on a whiff from a florist's shop. Oh, there is a nostalgia lurks in old scents!

Even to Hanna de Long, hurrying eastward on Forty-second Street, huggingly against the shadow of darkened shop-windows, there was a new sting of tears at the smell of earth, daring, in the lull of a city night, to steal out.

There are always these dark figures that scuttle thus through the first hours of the morning.

Whither?

Twice remarks were flung after her from pa.s.sing figures in slouch-hats--furtive remarks through closed lips.

At five minutes past one she was at the ticket-office grating of a train-terminal that was more ornate than a rajah's dream.

"Adalia--please. Huh? Ohio. Next train."

"Seven-seven. Track nine. Round trip?"

"N-no."

"Eighteen-fifty."

She again bit open the corner knot of her handkerchief.

When Hanna de Long, freshly train-washed of train dust, walked down Third Street away from the station, old man Rentzenauer, for forty-odd springs coaxing over the same garden, was spraying a hose over a side-yard of petunias, s.h.i.+rt-sleeved, his waistcoat hanging open, and in the purpling light his old head merging back against a story-and-a-half house the color of gray weather and half a century of service.