Gigolo

GIGOLO

Books by Edna Ferber

BUTTERED SIDE DOWN
CHEERFUL, BY REQUEST
EMMA MCCHESNEY & Co.
DAWN O'HARA
FANNY HERSELF
GIGOLO

HALF PORTIONS
PERSONALITY PLUS
ROAST BEEF MEDIUM
THE GIRLS
$1200 A YEAR

GIGOLO

BY
EDNA FERBER

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
19SS

?s

isn

1042269

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, I92O, BY MCCLURE's MAGAZINE, INCORPORATED
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY P. F. COLLIER * SON COMPANY IN THE UNITED

STATES, GBEAT BRITAIN, AND CANADA

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY, AND THE
PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 1

OLD MAN MINICK 34

GIGOLO 69

NOT A DAT OVER TWENTY-ONE 106

HOME GIRL 150

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 188

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 222

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL ! . . . 259

GIGOLO

GIGOLO

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN

f~ • CHOUGH he rarely heeded its summons —
cagy boy that he was — the telephone rang

-*• oftenest for Nick. Because of the many
native noises of the place, the telephone had a spe-
cial bell that was a combination buzz and ring. It
sounded above the roar of outgoing cars, the splash
of the hose, the sputter and hum of the electric bat-
tery in the rear. Nick heard it, unheeding. A
voice — Smitty's or Mike's or Elmer's — answering
its call. Then, echoing through the grey, vaulted
spaces of the big garage: "Nick! Oh, Ni-ick!"

From the other side of the great cement-floored
enclosure, or in muffled tones from beneath a car:
"Whatcha want?"

"Dame on the wire."

"I ain't in."

The obliging voice again, dutifully repeating the
message: "He ain't in. ... Well, it's hard to
say. He might be in in a couple hours and then

l

2 GIGOLO

again he might not be back till late. I guess he's

went to Hammond on a job ' (Warming to

his task now.) "Say, won't I do? . . . Who's
fresh ! Aw, say, lady!"

You'd think, after repeated rebuffs of this sort,
she could not possibly be so lacking in decent pride
as to leave her name for Smitty or Mike or Elmer
to bandy about. But she invariably did, baffled by
Nick's elusiveness. She was likely to be any one of
a number. Miss Bauers phoned: Will you tell him,
please? (A nasal voice, and haughty, with the
hauteur that seeks to conceal secret fright.) Tell
him it's important. Miss Ahearn phoned: Will
you tell him, please? Just say Miss Ahearn.
A-h-e-a-r-n. Miss Olson: Just Gertie. But often-
est Miss Bauers.

Cupid's messenger, wearing grease-grimed over-
alls and the fatuous grin of the dalliant male, would
transmit his communication to the uneager Nick.

" 'S wonder you wouldn't answer the phone onct
yourself. Says you was to call Miss Bauers any
time you come in between one and six at Hyde
Park — wait a min't' — yeh — Hyde Park 6079, and
any time after six at "

"Wha'd she want?"

"Well, how the hell should 7 know! Says call
Miss Bauers any time between one and six at Hyde
Park 6 "

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 3

"Swell chanst. Swell chanst !"

Which explains why the calls came oftenest for
Nick. He was so indifferent to them. You pic-
tured the patient and persistent Miss Bauers, or
the oxlike Miss Olson, or Miss Ahearn, or just
Gertie hovering within hearing distance of the tele-
phone listening, listening — while one o'clock deep-
ened to six — for the call that never came; plucking
up fresh courage at six until six o'clock dragged on
to bedtime. When next they met: "I bet you was
there all the time. Pity you wouldn't answer a call
when a person leaves their name. You could of
give me a ring. I bet you was there all the time."

"Well, maybe I was."

Bewildered, she tried to retaliate with the boomer-
ang of vituperation.

How could she know? How could she know that
this slim, slick young garage mechanic was a wood-
land creature in disguise — a satyr in store clothes —
a wild thing who perversely preferred to do his own
pursuing? How could Miss Bauers know — she who
cashiered in the Green Front Grocery and Market
on Fifty- third Street? Or Miss Olson, at the
Rialto ticket window? Or the Celtic, emotional
Miss Ahearn, the manicure? Or Gertie the goof?
They knew nothing of mythology; of pointed ears
and pug noses and goat's feet. Nick's ears, to their
fond gaze, presented an honest red surface pro-

4 GIGOLO

truding from either side of his head. His feet, in
tan laced shoes, were ordinary feet, a little more
than ordinarily expert, perhaps, in the convolutions
of the dance at Englewood Masonic Hall, which is
part of Chicago's vast South Side. No; a faun,
to Miss Bauers, Miss Olson, Miss Ahearn, and just
Gertie, was one of those things in the Lincoln Park
Zoo.

Perhaps, sometimes, they realized, vaguely, that
Nick was different. When, for example, they tried
— and failed — to picture him looking interestedly at
one of those three-piece bedroom sets glistening like
pulled taffy in the window of the installment furni-
ture store, while they, shy yet proprietary, clung
to his arm and eyed the price ticket. Now $98.50.
You couldn't see Nick interested in bedroom sets,
in price tickets, in any of those settled, fixed, every-
day things. He was fluid, evasive, like quicksilver,
though they did not put it thus.

Miss Bauers, goaded to revolt, would say pet-
tishly : "You're like a mosquito, that's what. Person
never knows from one minute to the other where
you're at."

"Yeh," Nick would retort. "When you know
where a mosquito's at, what do you do to him?
Plenty. I ain't looking to be squashed."

Miss Ahearn, whose public position (the Hygienic
Barber Shop. Gent's manicure. 50c.) offered un-

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 5

limited social opportunities, would assume a gay
indifference. "They's plenty boys begging to take
me out every hour in the day. Swell lads, too. I
ain't waiting round for any greasy mechanic like
you. Don't think it. Say, lookit your nails!
They'd queer you with me, let alone what else all
is wrong with you."

In answer Nick would put one hand — one broad,
brown, steel-strong hand with its broken discoloured
nails — on Miss Ahearn's arm, in its flimsy geor-
gette sleeve. Miss Ahearn's eyelids would flutter
and close, and a little shiver would run with icy-hot
feet all over Miss Ahearn.

Nick was like that.

Nick's real name wasn't Nick at all — or scarcely
at all. His last name was Nicholas, and his parents,
long before they became his parents, traced their
origin to some obscure Czechoslovakian province —
long before we became so glib with our Czechoslo-
vakia. His first name was Dewey, knowing which
you automatically know the date of his birth. It
was a patriotic but unfortunate choice on the part
of his parents. The name did not fit him ; was too
mealy ; not debonair enough. Nick. Nicky in
tenderer moments (Miss Bauers, Miss Olson, Miss
Ahearn, just Gertie, et al.).

His method with women was firm and somewhat
stern, but never brutal. He never waited for them

6 GIGOLO

if they were late. Any girl who assumed that her
value was enhanced in direct proportion to her
tardiness in keeping an engagement with Nick found
herself standing disconsolate on the corner of Fifty-
third and Lake trying to look as if she were merely
waiting for the Lake Park car and not peering
wistfully up and down the street in search of a slim,
graceful, hurrying figure that never came.

It is difficult to convey in words the charm that
Nick possessed. Seeing him, you beheld merely a
medium-sized young mechanic in reasonably grimed
garage clothes when working; and in tight pants,
tight coat, silk shirt, long-visored green cap when
at leisure. A rather pallid skin due to the nature
of his work. Large deft hands, a good deal like
the hands of a surgeon, square, blunt-fingered, spat-
ulate. Indeed, as you saw him at work, a wire-
netted electric bulb held in one hand, the other
plunged deep into the vitals of the car on which he
was engaged, you thought of a surgeon performing
a major operation. He wore one of those round
skullcaps characteristic of his craft (the brimless
crown of an old felt hat). He would deftly remove
the transmission case and plunge his hand deep into
the car's guts, feeling expertly about with his engine-
wise fingers as a surgeon feels for liver, stomach, gall
bladder, intestines, appendix. When he brought up
his hand, all dripping with grease (which is the warm

blood of the car), he invariably had put his finger
on the sore spot.

All this, of course, could not serve to endear him
to the girls. On the contrary, you would have
thought that his hands alone, from which he could
never quite free the grease and grit, would have
caused some feeling of repugnance among the lily-
fingered. But they, somehow, seemed always to be
finding an excuse to touch him : his tie, his hair, his
coat sleeve. They seemed even to derive a vicarious
thrill from holding his hat or cap when on an out-
ing. They brushed imaginary bits of lint from his
coat lapel. They tried on his seal ring, crying:
"Oo, lookit, how big it is for me, even my thumb!"
He called this "pawing a guy over"; and the lint
ladies he designated as "thread pickers."

No; it can't be classified, this powerful draw he
had for them. His conversation furnished no clue.
It was commonplace conversation, limited, even dull.
When astonished, or impressed, or horrified, or
amused, he said: "Ken yuh feature that!" When
emphatic or confirmatory, he said : "You tell 'em !"

It wasn't his car and the opportunities it furnished
for drives, both country and city. That motley
piece of mechanism represented such an assemblage
of unrelated parts as could only have been made
to coordinate under Nick's expert guidance. It
was out of commission more than half the time, and

8 GIGOLO

could never be relied upon to furnish a holiday.
Both Miss Bauers and Miss Ahearn had twelve-
cylinder opportunities that should have rendered
them forever unfit for travel in Nick's one-lung
vehicle of locomotion.

It wasn't money. Though he was generous enough
with what he had, Nick couldn't be generous with
what he hadn't. And his wage at the garage was
$40 a week. Miss Ahearn's silk stockings cost $4.50.

His unconcern should have infuriated them, but
it served to pique. He wasn't actually as uncon-
cerned as he appeared, but he had early learned that
effort in their direction was unnecessary. Nick had
little imagination ; a gorgeous selfishness ; a toler-
antly contemptuous liking for the sex. Naturally,
however, his attitude toward them had been some-
what embittered by being obliged to watch their
method of driving a car in and out of the Ideal
Garage doorway. His own manipulation of the
wheel was nothing short of wizardry.

He played the harmonica.

Each Thursday afternoon was Nick's half day
off. From twelve until seven-thirty he was free to
range the bosky highways of Chicago. When his car
— he called it "the bus" — was agreeable, he went
awheel in search of amusement. The bus being in-
disposed, he went afoot. He rarely made plans in
advance ; usually was accompanied by some success-

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 9

ful telephonee. He rather liked to have a silken
skirt beside him fluttering and flirting in the breeze
as he broke the speed regulations.

On this Thursday afternoon in July he had timed
his morning job to a miraculous nicety so that at
the stroke of twelve his workaday garments dropped
from him magically, as though he were a male (and
reversed) Cinderella. There was a wash room and
a rough sort of sleeping room containing two cots
situated in the second story of the Ideal Garage.
Here Nick shed the loose garments of labour for the
fashionably tight habiliments of leisure. Private
chauffeurs whose employers housed their cars in the
Ideal Garage used this nook for a lounge and smoker.
Smitty, Mike, Elmer, and Nick snatched stolen
siestas there in the rare absences of the manager.
Sometimes Nick spent the night there when forced
to work overtime. His home life, at best, was a
sketchy affair. Here chauffeurs, mechanics, wash-
ers lolled at ease exchanging soft-spoken gossip,
motor chat, speculation, comment, and occasional
verbal obscenity. Each possessed a formidable
knowledge of that neighbourhood section of Chicago
known as Hyde Park. This knowledge was not
confined to car costs and such impersonal items, but
included meals, scandals, relationships, finances, love
affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often
played his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal

10 GIGOLO

length of it in throbbing rendition of such sure-fire
sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or Mammy,
while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping
feet or wagging heads.

To-day the hot little room was empty except for
Nick, shaving before the cracked mirror on the wall,
and old Elmer, reading a scrap of yesterday's news-
paper as he lounged his noon hour away. Old Elmer
was thirty-seven, and Nicky regarded him as an
octogenarian. Also, old Elmer's conversation bored
Nick to the point of almost sullen resentment. Old
Elmer was a family man. His talk was all of his
family — the wife, the kids, the flat. A garrulous
person, lank, pasty, dish-faced, and amiable. His
half day off was invariably spent tinkering about the
stuffy little flat — painting, nailing up shelves, mend-
ing a broken window shade, puttying a window, play-
ing with his pasty little boy, aged sixteen months,
and his pasty little girl, aged three years. Next
day he regaled his fellow workers with elaborate
recitals of his holiday hours.

"Believe me, that kid's a caution. Sixteen months
old, and what does he do yesterday? He unfastens
the ketch on the back-porch gate. We got a gate
on the back porch, see." (This frequent "see" which
interlarded Elmer's verbiage was not used in an
interrogatory way, but as a period, and by way of
emphasis. His voice did not take the rising inflec-

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 11

tion as he uttered it.) "What does he do, he opens
it. I come home, and the wife says to me : 'Say, you
better get busy and fix a new ketch on that gate to
the back porch. Little Elmer, first thing I know,
he'd got it open to-day and was crawling out almost.'
Say, can you beat that for a kid sixteen months "

Nick had finished shaving, had donned his clean
white soft shirt. His soft collar fitted to a miracle
about his strong throat. Nick's sartorial effects
were a triumph — on forty a week. "Say, can't you
talk about nothing but that kid of yours? I bet
he's a bum specimen at that. Runt, like his pa."

Elmer flung down his newspaper in honest indig-
nation as Nick had wickedly meant he should. "Is
that so ! Why, we was wrastling round — me and
him, see — last night on the floor, and what does he
do, he raises his mitt and hands me a wallop in the
stomick it like to knock the wind out of me. That's
all. Sixteen months "

"Yeh. I suppose this time next year he'll be
boxing for money."

Elmer resumed his paper. "What do you know."
His tone mingled pity with contempt.

Nick took a last critical survey of the cracked
mirror's reflection and found it good. "Nothing,
only this : you make me sick with your kids and your
missus and your place. Say, don't you never have
no fun?"

12 GIGOLO

"Fun ! Why, say, last Sunday we was out to the
beach, and the kid swum out first thing you
know "

"Oh, shut up !" He was dressed now. He slapped
his pockets. Harmonica. Cigarettes. Matches.
Money. He was off, his long-visored cloth cap
pulled jauntily over his eyes.

Elmer, bearing no rancour, flung a last idle query :
"Where you going?"

"How should I know? Just bumming around.
Bus is outa commission, and I'm outa luck."

He clattered down the stairs, whistling.

Next door for a shine at the Greek bootblack's.
Enthroned on the dais, a minion at his feet, he
was momentarily monarchial. How's the boy?
Good? Same here. Down, his brief reign ended.
Out into the bright noon-day glare of Fifty-third
Street.

A fried-egg sandwich. Two blocks down and
into the white-tiled lunchroom. He took his place
in the row perched on stools in front of the white
slab, his feet on the railing, his elbows on the counter.
Four white-aproned vestals with blotchy skins per-
formed rites over the steaming nickel urns, slid
dishes deftly along the slick surface of the white slab,
mopped up moisture with a sly grey rag. No non-
sense about them. This was the rush hour. Hungry
men from the shops and offices and garages of the

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 13

district were bent on food (not badinage). They
ate silently, making a dull business of it. Coffee?
What kinda pie do you want? No fooling here.
"Hello, Jessie."

As she mopped the slab in front of him you noticed
a slight softening of her features, intent so grimly
on her task. "What's yours?"

"Bacon-and-egg sandwich. Glass of milk. Piece
of pie. Blueberry."

Ordinarily she would not have bothered. But with
him : "The blueberry ain't so good to-day, I noticed.
Try the peach?"

"All right." He looked at her. She smiled.
Incredibly, the dishes ordered seemed to leap out
at her from nowhere. She crashed them down on
the glazed white surface in front of him. The bacon-
and-egg sandwich was served open-faced, an
elaborate confection. Two slices of white bread,
side by side. On one reposed a fried egg, hard,
golden, delectable, indigestible. On the other three
crisp curls of bacon. The ordinary order held two
curls only. A dish so rich in calories as to make
it food sufficient for a day. Jessie knew nothing of
calories, nor did Nick. She placed a double order
of butter before him — two yellow pats, moisture-
beaded. As she scooped up his milk from the can
you saw that the glass was but three quarters filled.
From a deep crock she ladled a smaller scoop and

14 GIGOLO

filled the glass to the top. The deep crock held
cream. Nick glanced up at her again. Again
Jessie smiled. A plain damsel, Jessie, and capable.
She went on about her business. What's yours?
Coffee with? White or rye? No nonsense about,
her. And yet : "Pie all right ?"

"Yeh. It's good."

She actually blushed.

He finished, swung himself off the stool, nodded
to. Jessie. She stacked his dishes' with one lean,
capable hand, mopped the slab with the other, but
as she made for the kitchen she flung a glance at
him over her shoulder.

"Day off?"

"Yeh."

"Some folks has all the luck."

He grinned. His teeth were strong and white
and even. He walked toward the door with his light
quick step, paused for a toothpick as he paid his
check, was out again into the July sunlight. Her
face became dull again.

Well, not one o'clock. Guessed he'd shoot a little
pool. He dropped into Moriarty's cigar store. It
was called a cigar store because it dealt in maga-
zines, newspapers, soft drinks, golf balls, cigarettes,
pool, billiards, chocolates, chewing gum, and cigars.
In the rear of the store were four green-topped
tables, three for pool and one for billiards. He

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 15

hung about aimlessly, watching the game at the one
occupied table. The players were slim young men
like himself, their clothes replicas of his own, their
faces lean and somewhat hard. Two of them
dropped out. Nick took a cue from the rack, shed
his tight coat. They played under a glaring electric
light in the heat of the day, yet they seemed cool,
aloof, immune from bodily discomfort. It was a
strangely silent game and as mirthless as that of the
elfin bowlers in Rip Van Winkle. The slim-waisted
shirted figures bent plastically over the table in the
graceful postures of the game. You heard only
the click of the balls, an occasional low-voiced ex-
clamation. A solemn crew, and unemotional.

Now and then: "What's all the shootin' fur?"

"In she goes."

Nick, winner, tired of it in less than an hour.
He bought a bottle of some acidulous drink just off
the ice and refreshed himself with it, drinking from
the bottle's mouth. He was vaguely restless, dis-
satisfied. Out again into the glare of two o'clock
Fifty-third Street. He strolled up a block toward
Lake Park Avenue. It was hot. He wished the
bus wasn't sick. Might go in swimming, though.
He considered this idly. Hurried steps behind him.
A familiar perfume wafted to his senses. A voice
nasal yet cooing. Miss Bauers. Miss Bauers on
pleasure bent, palpably, being attired in the briefest

16 GIGOLO

of silks, white-strapped slippers, white silk stockings,
scarlet hat. The Green Front Grocery and Market
closed for a half day each Thursday afternoon dur-
ing July and August. Nicky had not availed him-
self of the knowledge.

"Well, if it ain't Nicky! I just seen you come
out of Moriarty's as I was passing." (She had
seen him go in an hour before and had waited a
patient hour in the drug store across the street.)
"What you doing around loose this hour the day,
anyway ?"

"I'm off 'safternoon."

"Are yuh? So'm I." Nicky said nothing. Miss
Bauers shifted from one plump silken leg to the
other. "What you doing?"

"Oh, nothing much."

"So'm I. Let's do it together." Miss Bauers
employed the direct method.

"Well," said Nick, vaguely. He didn't object
particularly. And yet he was conscious of some
formless programme forming mistily in his mind — a
programme that did not include the berouged, be-
powdered, plump, and silken Miss Bauers.

"I phoned you this morning, Nicky. Twice."

"Yeh?"

"They said you wasn't in."

"Yeh?"

A hard young woman, Miss Bauers, yet simple:

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 17

powerfully drawn toward this magnetic and careless
boy; powerless to forge chains strong enough to-
hold him. "Well, how about Riverview? I ain't
been this summer."

"Oh, that's so darn far. Take all day getting
there, pretty near."

"Not driving, it wouldn't."

"I ain't got the bus. Busted."

His apathy was getting on her nerves. "How
about a movie, then?" Her feet hurt. It was hot.

His glance went up the street toward the Harper,
down the street toward the Hyde Park. The sign
above the Harper offered Mother o' Mine. The
lettering above the Hyde Park announced Love's
Sacrifice.

"Gawd, no," he made decisive answer.

Miss Bauers's frazzled nerves snapped. "You
make me sick ! Standing there. Nothing don't suit
you. Say, I ain't so crazy to go round with you.
Cheap guy! Prob'ly you'd like to go over to
Wooded Island or something, in Jackson Park, and
set on the grass and feed the squirrels. That'd be
a treat for me, that would." She laughed a high,
scornful tear-near laugh.

"Why — say Nick stared at her, and yet

she felt he did not see her. A sudden peace came
into his face — the peace of a longing fulfilled. He
turned his head. A Lake Park Avenue street car

18 GIGOLO

was roaring its way toward them. He took a step
toward the roadway. "I got to be going."

Fear flashed its flame into Miss Bauers's pale
blue eyes. "Going! How do you mean, going?
Going where?"

"I got to be going." The car had stopped op-
posite them. His young face was stern, implacable.
Miss Bauers knew she was beaten, but she clung to
hope tenaciously, piteously. "I got to see a party,
see?"

"You never said anything about it in the first
place. Pity you wouldn't say so in the first place.
Who you got to see, anyway?" She knew it was
useless to ask. She knew she was beating her fists
against a stone wall, but she must needs ask not-
withstanding: "Who you got to see?"

"I got to see a party. I forgot." He made
the car step in two long strides; had swung himself
up. "So long !" The car door slammed after him.
Miss Bauers, in her unavailing silks, stood discon-
solate on the hot street corner.

He swayed on the car platform until Sixty-third
Street was reached. There he alighted and stood
a moment at the curb surveying idly the populous
corner. He purchased a paper bag of hot peanuts
from a vender's glittering scarlet and nickel stand,
and crossed the street into the pathway that led
to Jackson Park, munching as he went. In an open

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 19

space reserved for games some boys were playing
baseball with much hoarse hooting and frenzied
action. He drew near to watch. The ball, mis-
directed, sailed suddenly toward him. He ran back-
ward at its swift approach, leaped high, caught it,
and with a long curving swing, so easy as to appear
almost effortless, sent it hurtling back. The lad on
the pitcher's mound made as if to catch it, changed
his mind, dodged, started after it.

The boy at bat called to Nick : "Heh, you ! Wanna
come on and pitch?"

Nick shook his head and went on.

He wandered leisurely along the gravel path that
led to the park golf shelter. The wide porch was
crowded with golfers and idlers. A foursome was
teed up at the first tee. Nick leaned against a
porch pillar waiting for them to drive. That old
boy had pretty good practise swing. . . . Stiff,
though. . . . Lookit that dame. Je's! I bet
she takes fifteen shots before she ever gets on to the
green. . . . There, that kid had pretty good
drive. Must of been hundred and fifty, anyway.
Pretty good for a kid.

Nick, in the course of his kaleidoscopic career,
had been a caddie at thirteen in torn shirt and flap-
ping knickers. He had played the smooth, expert,
scornful game of the caddie with a natural swing
from the lithe waist and a follow-through that was

20 GIGOLO

the envy of the muscle-bound men who watched him.
He hadn't played in years. The game no longer
interested him. He entered the shelter lunchroom.
The counters were lined with lean, brown, hungry
men and lean, brown, hungry women. They were eat-
ing incredible dishes considering that the hour was
3 P. M. and the day a hot one. Corned-beef hash
with a poached egg on top; wieners and potato
salad ; meat pies ; hot roast beef sandwiches ; steam-
ing cups of coffee in thick white ware; watermelon.
Nick slid a leg over a stool as he had done earlier in
the afternoon. Here, too, the Hebes were of stern
stuff, as they needs must be to serve these ravenous
hordes of club swingers who swarmed upon them
from dawn to dusk. Their task it was to wait upon
the golfing male, which is man at his simplest — re-
duced to the least common denominator and shorn
of all attraction for the female eye and heart. They
represented merely hungry mouths, weary muscles,
reaching fists. The waitresses served them as a
capable attendant serves another woman's child —
efficiently and without emotion.

"Blueberry pie a la mode," said Nick — "with
strawberry ice cream."

Inured as she was to the horrors of gastronomic
miscegenation, the waitress — an old girl — recoiled
at this.

"Say, I don't think you'd like that. They don't

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 21

mix so very good. Why don't you try the peach
pie instead with the strawberry ice cream — if you
want strawberry?" He looked so young and cool
and fresh.

"Blueberry," repeated Nick sternly, and looked
her in the eye. The old waitress laughed a little
and was surprised to find herself laughing. " 'S
for you to say." She brought him the monstrous
mixture, and he devoured it to the last chromatic
crumb.

"Nothing the matter with that," he remarked as
she passed, dish-laden.

She laughed again tolerantly, almost tenderly.
"Good thing you're young." Her busy glance
lingered a brief moment on his face. He sauntered
out.

Now he took the path to the right of the shelter,
crossed the road, struck the path again, came to a
rustic bridge that humped high in the middle, span-
ning a cool green stream, willow-bordered. The cool
green stream was an emerald chain that threaded
its way in a complete circlet about the sylvan spot
known as Wooded Island, relic of World's Fair
days.

The little island lay, like a thing under enchant-
ment, silent, fragrant, golden, green, exquisite.
Squirrels and blackbirds, rabbits and pigeons
mingled in ^Esopian accord. The air was warm and

22 GIGOLO

still, held by the encircling trees and shrubbery.
There was not a soul to be seen. At the far north
end the two Japanese model houses, survivors of the
exposition, gleamed white among the trees.

Nick stood a moment. His eyelids closed, languor-
ously. He stretched his arms out and up delicious-
ly, bringing his stomach in and his chest out.
He took off his cap and stuffed it into his pocket.
He strolled across the thick cool nap of the grass,
deserting the pebble path. At the west edge of the
island a sign said: "No One Allowed in the Shrub-
bery." Ignoring 'it, Nick parted the branches,
stopped and crept, reached the bank that sloped
down to the cool green stream, took off his coat,
and lay relaxed upon the ground. Above him the
tree branches made a pattern against the sky.
Little ripples lipped the shore. Scampering velvet-
footed things, feathered things, winged things made
pleasant stir among the leaves. Nick slept.

He awoke in half an hour refreshed. He lay there,
thinking of nothing — a charming gift. He found
a stray peanut in his pocket and fed it to a friendly
squirrel. His hand encountered the cool metal of
his harmonica. He drew out the instrument, placed
his coat, folded, under his head, crossed his knees,
one leg swinging idly, and began to play rapturously.
He was perfectly happy. He played Gimme Love,
whose jazz measures are stolen from Mendelssohn's

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 23

Spring Song. He did not know this. The leaves
rustled. He did not turn his head.

"Hello, Pan!" said a voice. A girl came down
the slope and seated herself beside him. She was
not smiling.

Nick removed the harmonica from his lips and
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Hello
who?"

"Hello, Pan."

"Wrong number, lady," Nick said, and again
applied his lips to the mouth organ. The girl
laughed then, throwing back her head. Her throat
was long and slim and brown. She clasped her
knees with her arms and looked at Nick amusedly.
Nick thought she was a kind of homely little thing.

"Pan," she explained, "was a pagan deity. He
played pipes in the woods."

" 'S all right with me," Nick ventured, bewildered
but amiable. He wished she'd go away. But she
didn't. She began to take off her shoes and stock-
ings. She went down to the water's edge, then, and
paddled her feet. Nick sat up, outraged. "Say,
you can't do that."

She glanced back at him over her shoulder. "Oh,
yes, I can. It's so hot." She wriggled her toes
ecstatically.

The leaves rustled again, briskly, unmistakably
this time. A heavy tread. A rough voice. "Say,

24 GIGOLO

looka here ! Get out of there, you ! What the "

A policeman, red-faced, wroth. "You can't do that !
Get outa here!"

It was like a movie, Nick thought.

The girl turned her head. "Oh, now, Mr. El-
wood," she said.

"Oh, it's you, miss," said the policeman. You
would not have believed it could be the same police-
man. He even giggled. "Thought you was away."

"I was. In fact, I am, really. I just got sick of
it and ran away for a day. Drove. Alone. The
family'll be wild."

"All the way?" said the policeman, incredulously.
"Say, I thought that looked like your car standing
out there by the road ; but I says no, she ain't in
town." He looked sharply at Nick, whose face had
an Indian composure, though his feelings were
mixed. "Who's this?"

"He's a friend of mine. His name's Pan." She
was drying her feet with an inadequate rose-coloured
handkerchief. She crept crabwise up the bank, and
put on her stockings and slippers.

"Why 'n't you come out and set on a bench?" sug-
gested the policeman, worriedly.

The girl shook her head. "In Arcadia we don't
sit on benches. I should think you'd know that.
Go on away, there's a dear. I want to talk to this
—to Pan."

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 25

He persisted. "What'd your pa say, I'd like to
know!" The girl shrugged her shoulders. Nick
made as though to rise. He was worried. A nut,
that's what. She pressed him down again with a
hard brown hand.

"Now it's all right. He's going. Old Fuss!"
The policeman stood a brief moment longer. Then
the foliage rustled again. He was gone. The girl
sighed, happily. "Play that thing some more, will
you? You're a wiz at it, aren't you?"

"I'm pretty good," said Nick, modestly. Then
the outrageousness of her conduct struck him afresh.
"Say, who're you, anyway ?"

"My name's Berry — short for Bernice. . . .
What's yours, Pan?"

"Nick— that is— Nick."

"Ugh, terrible! I'll stick to Pan. What d'you
do when you're not Panning?" Then, at the be-
wilderment in his face: "What's your job?"

"I work in the Ideal Garage. Say, you're pretty
nosey, ain't you?"

"Yes, pretty. . . . That accounts for your
nails, h'm?" She looked at her own brown paws.
'* 'Bout as bad as mine. I drove one hundred and
fifty miles to-day."

"Ya-as, you did !"

"I did ! Started at six. And I'll probably drive
back to-night."

26 GIGOLO

"You're crazy!"

"I know it," she agreed, "and it's wonderful.
. . . Can you play the Tommy Toddle?"

"Yeh. It's kind of hard, though, where the runs
are. I don't get the runs so very good." He
played it. She kept time with head and feet. When
he had finished and wiped his lips :

"Elegant !" She took the harmonica from him,
wiped it brazenly on the much-abused, rose-coloured
handkerchief and began to play, her cheeks puffed
out, her eyes round with effort. She played the
Tommy Toddle, and her runs were perfect. Nick's
chagrin was swallowed by his admiration and envy.

"Say, kid, you got more wind than a factory
whistle. Who learned you to play?"

She struck her chest with a hard brown fist.
"Tennis. . . . Tim taught me."

"Who's Tim?"

"The— a chauffeur."

Nick leaned closer. "Say, do you ever go to the
dances at Englewood Masonic Hall?"

"I never have."

" 'Jah like to go some time?"

"I'd love it." She grinned up at him, her teeth
flashing white in her brown face.

"It's swell here," he said, dreamily. "Like the
woods ?"

"Yes."

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 27

"Winter, when it's cold and dirty, I think about
how it's here summers. It's like you could take it
out of your head and look at it whenever you wanted
to."

"Endymion."

"Huh?"

"A man said practically the same thing the other
day. Name of Keats."

"Yeh?"

"He said: *A thing of beauty is a joy forever.' '

"That's one way putting it," he agreed, gra-
ciously.

Unsmilingly she reached over with one slim fore-
finger, as if compelled, and touched the blond hairs
on Nick's wrist. Just touched them. Nick re-
mained motionless. The girl shivered a little, de-
liciously. She glanced at him shyly. Her lips were
provocative. Thoughtlessly, blindly, Nick suddenly
flung an arm about her, kissed her. He kissed her
as he had never kissed Miss Bauers — as he had never
kissed Miss Ahearn, Miss Olson, or just Gertie. The
girl did not scream, or push him away, or slap him,
or protest, or giggle as would have the above-
mentioned young ladies. She sat breathing rather
fast, a tinge of scarlet showing beneath the tan.

"Well, Pan," she said, low-voiced, "you're running
true to form, anyway." She eyed him appraisingly.
"Your appeal is in your virility, I suppose. Yes."

28 GIGOLO

"My what?"

She rose. "I've got to go."

Panic seized him. "Say, don't drive back to-night,
huh? Wherever it is you've got to go. You ain't
driving back to-night?"

She made no answer; parted the bushes, was out
on the gravel path in the sunlight, a slim, short-
skirted, almost childish figure. He followed. They
crossed the bridge, left the island, reached the road-
way almost in silence. At the side of the road was
a roadster. Its hood was the kind that conceals
power. Its lamps were two giant eyes rimmed in
precious metal. Its line spelled strength. Its body
was foreign. Nick's engine-wise eyes saw these
things at a glance.

"That your car?"

"Yes."

"Gosh!"

She unlocked it, threw in the clutch, shifted,
moved. "Say!" was wrung from Nick helplessly.
She waved at him. "Good-bye, Pan." He stared,
stricken. She was off swiftly, silently; flashed
around a corner; was hidden by the trees and
shrubs.

He stood a moment. He felt bereaved, cheated.
Then a little wave of exaltation shook him. He
wanted to talk to someone. "Gosh !" he said again.
He glanced at his wrist. Five-thirty. He guessed

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 29

he'd go home. He guessed he'd go home and get one
of Ma's dinners. One of Ma's dinners and talk to
Ma. The Sixty-third Street car. He could make
it and back in plenty time.

Nick lived in that section of Chicago known as
Englewood, which is not so sylvan as it sounds, but
appropriate enough for a faun. Not only that ; he
lived in S. Green Street, Englewood. S. Green
Street, near Seventieth, is almost rural with its great
elms and poplars, its frame cottages, its back gar-
dens. A neighbourhood of thrifty, foreign-born
fathers and mothers, many children, tree-lined
streets badly paved. Nick turned in at a two-story
brown frame cottage. He went around to the back.
Ma was in the kitchen.

Nick's presence at the evening meal was an un-
certain thing. Sometimes he did not eat at home
for a week, excepting only his hurried early break-
fast. He rarely spent an evening at home, and
when he did used the opportunity for making up
lost sleep. Pa never got home from work until
after six. Nick liked his dinner early and hot. On
his rare visits his mother welcomed him like one of
the Gracchi. Mother and son understood each other
wordlessly, having much in common. You would
not have thought it of her (forty-six bust, forty
waist, measureless hips), but Ma was a nymph at
heart. Hence Nick.

30 GIGOLO

"Hello, Ma !" She was slamming expertly about
the kitchen.

"Hello, yourself," said Ma. Ma had a line of
slang gleaned from her numerous brood. It fell
strangely from her lips. Ma had never quite lost
a tinge of foreign accent, though she had come to
America when a girl. A hearty, zestful woman,
savouring life with gusto, undiminished by child-
bearing and hard work. "Eating home, Dewey?"
She alone used his given name.

"Yeh, but I gotta be back by seven-thirty. Got
anything ready?"

"Dinner ain't, but I'll get you something. Plenty.
Platter ham and eggs and a quick fry. Cherry cob-
bler's done. I'll fix you some." (Cherry cobbler is
shortcake with a soul.)

He ate enormously at the kitchen table, she hover-
ing over him.

"What's the news, Dewey?"

"Ain't none." He ate in silence. Then: "How
old was you when you married Pa ?"

"Me? Say, I wasn't no more'n a kid. I gotta
laugh when I think of it."

"What was Pa earning?"

She laughed a great hearty laugh, dipping a piece
of bread sociably in the ham fat on the platter as
she stood by the table, just to bear him company.

"Say, earn! If he'd of earned what you was

THE AFTERXOON OF A FAUN 31

earning now, we'd of thought we was millionaires.
Time Etty was born he was pulling down thirteen a
week, and we saved on it." She looked at him sud-
denly, sharply. "Why?"

"Oh, I was just wondering."

"Look what good money he's getting now! If
I was you, I wouldn't stick around no old garage for
what they give you. You could get a good job in
the works with Pa ; first thing you know you'd be
pulling down big money. You're smart like that
with engines. . . . Takes a lot of money now-
adays for feller' to get married."

"You tell Jem," agreed Nick. He looked up at
her, having finished eating. His glance was almost
tender. "How'd you come to marry Pa, anyway?
You and him's so different."

The nymph in Ma leaped to the surface and stayed
there a moment, sparkling, laughing, dimpling.
"Oh, I dunno. I kept running away and he kept
running after. Like that."

He looked up again quickly at that. "Yeh.
That's it. Fella don't like to have no girl chasing
him all the time. Say, he likes to do the chasing
himself. Ain't that the truth?"

"You tell 'em !" agreed Ma. A great jovial laugh
shook her. Heavy-footed now, but light of heart.

Suddenly : "I'm thinking of going to night school.
Learn something. I don't know nothing."

32 GIGOLO

"You do, too, Dewey!"

"Aw, wha'd I know? I never had enough school-
ing. Wished I had."

"Who's doings was it? You wouldn't stay.
Wouldn't go no more than sixth reader and quit.
Nothing wouldn't get you to go."

He agreed gloomily. "I know it. I don't know
what nothing is. Uh — Arcadia — or — now — vitality
or nothing."

"Oh, that comes easy," she encouraged him, "when
you begin once."

He reached for her hand gratefully. "You're a
swell cook, Ma." He had a sudden burst of gener-
osity, of tenderness. "Soon's the bus is fixed I'll
take you joy-riding over to the lake."

Ma always wore a boudoir cap of draggled lace
and ribbon for motoring. Nick almost never offered
her a ride. She did not expect him to.

She pushed him playfully. "Go on! You got
plenty young girls to take riding, not your
ma."

"Oh, girls !" he said, scornfully. Then in another
tone: "Girls."

He was off. It was almost seven. Pa was late.
He caught a car back to Fifty-third Street. Elmer
was lounging in the cool doorway of the garage.
Nick, in sheer exuberance of spirits, squared off,
doubled his fists, and danced about Elmer in a

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 33

semicircle, working his arms as a prizefighter does,
warily. He jabbed at Elmer's jaw playfully.

<rWhat you been doing," inquired that long-
suffering gentleman, "makes you feel so good?
Where you been ?"

"Oh, nowheres. Bumming round. Park."

He turned in the direction of the stairway. Elmer
lounged after him. "Oh, say, dame's been calling
you for the last hour and a half. Like to busted the
phone. Makes me sick."

"Aw, Bauers."

"No, that wasn't the name. Name's Mary or
Berry, or something like that. A dozen times, I
betcha. Says you was to call her as soon as you
come in. Drexel 47 — wait a min't' — yeh — that's
right— Drexel 473 "

"Swell chanst," said Nick. Suddenly his buoy-
ancy was gone. His shoulders drooped. His ciga-
rette dangled limp. Disappointment curved his
lips, burdened his eyes. "Swell chanst I"

OLD MAN MINICK

HIS wife had always spoiled him outrageously.
No doubt of that. Take, for example, the
matter of the pillows merely. Old man
Minick slept high. That is, he thought he slept
high. He liked two plump pillows on his side of
the great, wide, old-fashioned cherry bed. He would
sink into them with a vast grunting and sighing and
puffing expressive of nerves and muscles relaxed and
gratified. But in the morning there was always
one pillow on the floor. He had thrown it there.
Always, in the morning, there it lay, its plump
white cheek turned reproachfully up at him from
the side of the bed. Ma Minick knew this, naturally,
after forty years of the cherry bed. But she never
begrudged him that extra pillow. Each morning,
when she arose, she picked it up on her way to shut
the window. Each morning the bed was made up
with two pillows on his side of it, as usual.

Then there was the window. Ma Minick liked
it open wide. Old man Minick, who rather prided
himself on his modernism (he called it being up to
date) was distrustful of the night air. In the folds

34

OLD MAN MINICK 35

of its sable mantle lurked a swarm of dread things
— colds, clammy miasmas, fevers.

"Night air's just like any other air," Ma Minick
would say, with some asperity. Ma Minick was no
worm; and as modern as he. So when they went
to bed the window would be open wide. They would
lie there, the two old ones, talking comfortably about
commonplace things. The kind of talk that goes
on between a man and a woman who have lived to-
gether in wholesome peace (spiced with occasional
wholesome bickerings) for more than forty years.

"Remind me to see Gerson to-morrow about that
lock on the basement door. The paper's full of
burglars."

"If I think of it." She never failed to.

"George and Nettie haven't been over in a week
now."

"Oh, well, young folks . . . Did you stop in
and pay that Koritz the fifty cents for pressing your
suit?"

"By golly, I forgot again! First thing in the
morning."

A sniff. "Just smell the Yards." It was Chicago.

"Wind must be from the west."

Sleep came with reluctant feet, but they wooed
her patiently. And presently she settled down
between them and they slept lightly. Usually, some
time during the night, he awoke, slid cautiously and

36 GIGOLO

with infinite stealth from beneath the covers and
closed the wide-flung window to within a bare two
inches of the sill. Almost invariably she heard him ;
but she was a wise old woman ; a philosopher of parts.
She knew better than to allow a window to shatter
the peace of their marital felicity. As she lay
there, smiling a little grimly in the dark and giving
no sign of being awake, she thought, "Oh, well, I
guess a closed window won't kill me either."

Still, sometimes, just to punish him a little, and
to prove that she was nobody's fool, she would wait
until he had dropped off to sleep again and then
she, too, would achieve a stealthy trip to the
window and would raise it slowly, carefully, inch
by inch.

"How did that window come to be open?" he would
say in the morning, being a poor dissembler.

"Window? Why, it's just the way it was when we
went to bed." And she would stoop to pick up the
pillow that lay on the floor.

There was little or no talk of death between this
comfortable, active, sound-appearing man of almost
seventy, and this plump capable woman of sixty-
six. But as always, between husband and wife, it
was understood wordlessly (and without reason)
that old man Minick would go first. Not that either
of them had the slightest intention of going. In
fact, when it happened they were planning to spend

OLD MAN MINICK 37

the winter in California and perhaps live there in-
definitely if they liked it and didn't get too lonesome
for George and Nettie, and the Chicago smoke, and
Chicago noise, and Chicago smells and rush and
dirt. Still, the solid sum paid yearly in insurance
premiums showed clearly that he meant to leave her
in comfort and security. Besides, the world is full
of widows. Everyone sees that. But how many
widowers? Few. Widows there are by the thou-
sands ; living alone ; living in hotels ; living with
married daughters and sons-in-law or married sons
and daughters-in-law. But of widowers in a like
situation there are bewilderingly few. And why
this should be no one knows.

So, then. The California trip never materialized.
And the year that followed never was quite clear in
old man Minick's dazed mind. In the first place, it
was the year in which stocks tumbled and broke their
backs. Gilt-edged securities showed themselves to
be tinsel. Old man Minick had retired from active
business just one year before, meaning to live com-
fortably on the fruit of a half-century's toil. He
now saw that fruit rotting all about him. There was
in it hardly enough nourishment to sustain them.
Then came the day when Ma Minick went downtown
to see Matthews about that pain right here and
came home looking shrivelled, talking shrilly about
nothing, and evading Pa's eyes. Followed months

38 GIGOLO

that were just a jumble of agony, X-rays, hope,
despair, morphia, nothingness.

After it was all over: "But I was going first,"
old man Minick said, dazedly.

The old house on Ellis near Thirty-ninth was sold
for what it would bring. George, who knew Chi-
cago real-estate if any one did, said they might as
well get what they could. Things would only go lower.
You'll see. And nobody's going to have any money
for years. Besides, look at the neighbourhood !

Old man Minick said George was right. He said
everybody was right. You would hardly have
recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face
the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick
used to spoil so delightfully. "You know best,
George. You know best." He who used to stand
up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say,
"Now, Pa, you don't know everything."

After Matthews' bills, and the hospital, and the
nurses and the medicines and the thousand and one
things were paid there was left exactly five hundred
dollars a year.

"You're going to make your home with us,
Father," George and Nettie said. Alma, too, said
this would be the best. Alma, the married daughter,
lived in Seattle. "Though you know Ferd and I
would be only too glad to have you."

Seattle! The ends of the earth. Oh, no. No! he

OLD MAN MINICK 39

protested, every fibre of his old frame clinging to the
accustomed. Seattle, at seventy ! He turned pit-
eous eyes on his son George and his daughter-in-law
Nettie. "You're going to make your home with
us, Father," they reassured him. He clung to them
gratefully. After it was over Alma went home to
her husband and their children.

So now he lived with George and Nettie in the five-
room flat on South Park Avenue, just across from
Washington Park. And there was no extra pillow
on the floor.

Nettie hadn't said he couldn't have the extra
pillow. He had told her he used two and she had
given him two the first week. But every morning
she had found a pillow cast on the floor.

"I thought you used two pillows, Father."

"I do."

"But there's always one on the floor when I make
the bed in the morning. You always throw one
on the floor. You only sleep on one pillow, really."

"I use two pillows."

But the second week there was one pillow. He
tossed and turned a good deal there in his bedroom
off the kitchen. But he got used to it in time. Not
used to it, exactly, but — well

The bedroom off the kitchen wasn't as menial
as it sounds. It was really rather cosy. The five-
room fit held living room, front bedroom, dining

40 GIGOLO

room, kitchen, and maid's room. The room off the
kitchen was intended as a maid's room but Nettie
had no maid. George's business had suffered with
the rest. George and Nettie had said, "I wish there
was a front room for you, Father. You could
have ours and we'd move back here, only this room's
too small for twin beds and the dressing table and
the chiffonier." They had meant it — or meant to
mean it.

"This is fine," old man Minick had said. "This
is good enough for anybody." There was a narrow
white enamel bed and a tiny dresser and a table.
Nettie had made gay cretonne covers and spreads
and put a little reading lamp on the table and
arranged his things. Ma Minick's picture on the
dresser with her mouth sort of pursed to make it
look small. It wasn't a recent picture. Nettie
and George had had it framed for him as a surprise.
They had often urged her to have a picture taken,
but she had dreaded it. Old man Minick didn't think
much of that photograph, though he never said so.
He needed no photograph of Ma Minick. He had
a dozen of them; a gallery of them; thousands of
them. Lying on his one pillow he could take them
out and look at them one by one as they passed in
review, smiling, serious, chiding, praising, there in
the dark. He needed no picture on his dresser.

A handsome girl, Nettie, and a good girl. He

OLD MAN MINICK 41

thought of her as a girl, though she was well past
thirty. George and Nettie had married late. This
was only the third year of their marriage. Alma,
the daughter, had married young, but George had
stayed on, unwed, in the old house on Ellis until
he was thirty-six and all Ma Minick's friends' daugh-
ters had had a try at him in vain. The old people
had urged him to marry, but it had been wonderful
to have him around the house, just the same. Some-
body young around the house. Not that George
had stayed around very much. But when he was
there you knew he was there. He whistled while
dressing. He sang in the bath. He roared down
the stairway, "Ma, where's my clean shirts?" The
telephone rang for him. Ma Minick prepared
special dishes for him. The servant girl said, "Oh,
now, Mr. George, look what you've done ! Gone and
spilled the grease all over my clean kitchen floor!"
and wiped it up adoringly while George laughed
and gobbled his bit of food filched from pot or frying
pan.

They had been a little surprised about Nettie.
George was in the bond business and she worked
for the same firm. A plump, handsome, eye-glassed
woman with fine fresh colouring, a clear skin that
old man Minick called appetizing, and a great coil
of smooth dark hair. She wore plain tailored things
and understood the bond business in a way that

42 GIGOLO

might have led you to think hers a masculine mind
if she hadn't been so feminine, too, in her manner.
Old man Minick had liked her better than Ma
Minick had.

Nettie had called him Pop and joked with him
and almost flirted with him in a daughterly sort
of way. He liked to squeeze her plump arm and
pinch her soft cheek between thumb and forefinger.
She would laugh up at him and pat his shoulder
and that shoulder would straighten spryly and he
would waggle his head doggishly.

"Look out there, George !" the others in the room
would say. "Your dad'll cut you out. First thing
you know you'll lose your girl, that's all."

Nettie would smile. Her teeth were white and
strong and even. Old man Minick would laugh
and wink, immensely pleased and flattered. "We
understand each other, don't we, Pop?" Nettie
would say.

During the first years of their married life Nettie
stayed home. She fussed happily about her little
flat, gave parties, went to parties, played bridge.
She seemed to love the ease, the relaxation, the small
luxuries. She and George were very much in love.
Before her marriage she had lived in a boarding
house on Michigan Avenue. At mention of it now
she puckered up her face. She did not attempt to
conceal her fondness for these five rooms of hers, so

OLD MAN MINICK 43

neat, so quiet, so bright, so cosy. Over-stuffed
velvet in the living room, with silk lamp-shades, and
small tables holding books and magazines and little
boxes containing cigarettes or hard candies. Very
modern. A gate-legged table in the dining room.
Caramel-coloured walnut in the bedroom, rich and
dark and smooth. She loved it. An orderly woman.
Everything in its place. Before eleven o'clock the
little apartment was shining, spotless; cushions
plumped, crumbs brushed, vegetables in cold water.
The telephone. "Hello! ... Oh, hello, Bess!
Oh, hours ago . . . Not a thing . . .
Well, if George is willing . . . I'll call him up
and ask him. We haven't seen a show in two weeks.
I'll call you back within the next half hour
No, I haven't done my marketing yet.
Yes, and have dinner downtown. Meet
at seven."

Into this orderly smooth-running mechanism was
catapulted a bewildered old man. She no longer
called him Pop. He never dreamed of squeezing
the plump arm or pinching the smooth cheek. She
called him Father. Sometimes George's Father.
Sometimes, when she was telephoning, there came to
him — "George's father's living with us now, you
know. I can't."

They were very kind to him, Nettie and George.
"Now just you sit right down here, Father. What

44 GIGOLO

do you want to go poking off into your own room
for?"

He remembered that in the last year Nettie had
said something about going back to work. There
wasn't enough to do around the house to keep her
busy. She was sick of afternoon parties. Sew and
eat, that's all, and gossip, or play bridge. Besides,
look at the money. Business was awful. The two
old people had resented this idea as much as George
had — more, in fact. They were scandalized.

"Young folks nowdays!" shaking their heads.
"Young folks nowdays. What are they thinking of !
In my day when you got married you had babies."
George and Nettie had had no babies. At first
Nettie had said, "I'm so happy. I just want a chance
to rest. I've been working since I was seventeen.
I just want to rest, first." One year. Two years.
Three. And now Pa Minick.

Ma Minick, in the old house on Ellis Avenue, had
kept a loose sort of larder ; not lavish, but plentiful.
They both ate a great deal, as old people are likely
to do. Old man Minick, especially, had liked to nib-
ble. A handful of raisins from the box on the shelf.
A couple of nuts from the dish on the sideboard. A
bit of candy rolled beneath the tongue. At dinner
(sometimes, toward the last, even at noon-time) a
plate of steaming soup, hot, revivifying, stimulating.
Plenty of this and plenty of that. "What's the mat-

OLD MAN MINICK 45

ter, Jo? You're not eating." But he was, amply.
Ma Minick had liked to see him eat too much. She
was wrong, of course.

But at Nettie's things were different. Hers was a
sufficient but stern menage. So many mouths to
feed; just so many lamb chops. Nettie knew about
calories and vitamines and mysterious things like
that, and talked about them. So many calories in
this. So many calories in that. He never was quite
clear in his mind about the&e things said to be
lurking in his food. He had always thought of
spinach as spinach, chops as chops. But to Nettie
they were calories. They lunched together, these
two. George was, of course, downtown. For her-
self Nettie would have one of those feminine pick-up
lunches ; a dab of apple sauce, a cup of tea, and a
slice of cold toast left from breakfast. This she
would eat while old man Minick guiltily supped up
his cup of warmed-over broth, or his coddled egg.
She always pressed upon him any bit of cold meat
that was left from the night before, or any remnants
of vegetable or spaghetti. Often there was quite a
little fleet of saucers and sauce plates grouped about
his main plate. Into these he dipped and swooped
uncomfortably, and yet with a relish. Sometimes,
when he had finished, he would look about, furtively.

"What'll you have, Father? Can I get you
something?"

46 GIGOLO

"Nothing, Nettie, nothing. I'm doing fine." She
had finished the last of her wooden toast and was
waiting for him, kindly.

Still, this balanced and scientific fare seemed to
agree with him. As the winter went on he seemed
actually to have regained most of his former hardi-
ness and vigour. A handsome old boy he was, ruddy,
hale, with the zest of a juicy old apple, slightly
withered but still sappy. It should be mentioned
that he had a dimple in his cheek which flashed un-
expectedly when he smiled. It gave him a roguish
— almost boyish — effect most appealing to the be-
holder. Especially the feminine beholder. Much
of his spoiling at the hands of Ma Minick had doubt-
less been due to this mere depression of the skin.

Spring was to bring a new and welcome source of
enrichment into his life. But these first six months
of his residence with George and Nettie were hard.
No spoiling there. He missed being made much of.
He got kindness, but he needed love. Then, too, he
was rather a gabby old man. He liked to hold forth.
In the old house- on Ellis there had been visiting back
and forth between men and women of his own age,
and Ma's. At these gatherings he had waxed ora-
torical or argumentative, and they had heard him,
some in agreement, some in disagreement, but always
respectfully, whether he prated of real estate or
social depravity ; prohibition or European exchange.

OLD MAN MINICK 47

"Let me tell you, here and now, something's got
to be done before you can get a country back on a
sound financial basis. Why, take Russia alone,
why . . ." "Or : "Young people nowdays ! They
don't know what respect means. I tell you there's
got to be a change and there will be, and it's
the older generation that's got to bring it about.
What do they know of hardship! What do they
know about work — real work. Most of 'em's never
done a real day's work in their life. All they think
of is dancing and gambling and drinking. Look
at the way they dress ! Look at . . ."

Ad lib.

"That's so," the others would agree. "I was say-
ing only yesterday . . ."

Then, too, until a year or two before, he had taken
active part in business. He had retired only at
the urging of Ma and the children. They said he
ought to rest and play and enjoy himself.

Now, as his strength and good spirits gradually
returned he began to go downtown, mornings. He
would dress, carefully, though a little shakily. He
had always shaved himself and he kept this up. All
in all, during the day, he occupied the bathroom
literally for hours, and this annoyed Nettie to the
point of frenzy, though she said nothing. He liked
the white cheerfulness of the little tiled room. He
puddled about in the water endlessly. Snorted and

48 GIGOLO

splashed and puffed and snuffled and blew. He was
one of those audible washers who emerge dripping
and whose ablutions are distributed impartially over
ceiling, walls, and floor.

Nettie, at the closed door: "Father, are you all
right?"

Splash! Prrrf! "Yes. Sure. I'm all right."

"Well, I didn't know. You've been in there so
long."

He was a neat old man, but there was likely to be
a spot or so on his vest or his coat lapel, or his tie.
Ma used to remove these, on or off him, as the oc-
casion demanded, rubbing carefully and scolding a
little, making a chiding sound between tongue and
teeth indicative of great impatience of his careless-
ness. He had rather enjoyed these sounds, and this
rubbing and scratching on the cloth with the finger-
nail and a moistened rag. They indicated that some-
one cared. Cared about the way he looked. Had
pride in him. Loved him. Nettie never removed
spots. Though infrequently she said, "Father, just
leave that suit out, will you? I'll send it to the
cleaner's with George's. The man's coming to-
morrow morning." He would look down at himself,
hastily, and attack a spot here and there with a
futile fingernail.

His morning toilette completed, he would make
for the Fifty-first Street L. Seated in the train

OLD MAN MIN1CK 49

he would assume an air of importance and testy
haste ; glance out of the window ; look at his watch.
You got the impression of a handsome and well-
preserved old gentleman on his way downtown to
consummate a shrewd business deal. He had been
familiar with Chicago's downtown for fifty years
and he could remember when State Street was a
tree-shaded cottage district. The noise and rush
and clangour of the Loop had long been familiar to
him. But now he seemed to find the downtown trip
arduous, even hazardous. The roar of the elevated
trains, the hoarse hoots of the motor horns, the
clang of the street cars, the bedlam that is Chicago's
downtown district bewildered him, frightened him
almost. He would skip across the street like a
harried hare, just missing a motor truck's nose and
all unconscious of the stream of invective directed
at him by its charioteer. "Heh ! Whatcha ! . . .
Look!" — Sometimes a policeman came to his aid,
or attempted to, but he resented this proffered help.

"Say, look here, my lad," he would say to the
tall, tired, and not at all burly (standing on one's
feet directing traffic at Wabash and Madison for
eight hours a day does not make for burliness)
policeman, "I've been coming downtown since long
before you were born. You don't need to help me.
I'm no jay from the country."

He visited the Stock Exchange. This depressed

50 GIGOLO

him. Stocks were lower than ever and still going
down. His five hundred a year was safe, but the
rest seemed doomed for his lifetime, at least. He
would drop in at George's office. George's office was
pleasantly filled with dapper, neat young men and
(surprisingly enough) dapper, slim young women,
seated at desks in the big light-flooded room. At
one corner of each desk stood a polished metal plac-
ard on a little standard, and bearing the name of
the desk's occupant. Mr. Owens. Mr. Satterlee.
Mr. James. Miss Rauch. Mr. Minick.

"Hello, Father," Mr. Minick would say, looking
annoyed. "What's bringing you down?"

"Oh, nothing. Nothing. Just had a little busi-
ness to tend to over at the Exchange. Thought I'd
drop in. How's business?"

"Rotten."

"I should think it was !" Old man Minick would
agree. "I — should — think — it — was ! Hm."

George wished he wouldn't. He couldn't have it,
that's all. Old man Minick would stroll over to the
desk marked Satterlee, or Owens, or James. These
brisk young men would toss an upward glance at
him and concentrate again on the sheets and files
before them. Old man Minick would stand, balanc-
ing from heel to toe and blowing out his breath a
little. He looked a bit yellow and granulated
and wavering, there in the cruel morning light of

OLD MAN MINICK 51

the big plate glass windows. Or perhaps it was the
contrast he presented with these slim, slick young
salesmen.

"Well, h'are you to-day, Mr. — uh — Satterlee?
What's the good word?"

Mr. Satterlee would not glance up this time. "I'm
pretty well. Can't complain."

"Good. Good."

"Anything I can do for you?"

"No-o-o. No. Not a thing. Just dropped in
to see my son a minute."

"I see." Not unkindly. Then, as old man
Minick still stood there, balancing, Mr. Satterlee
would glance up again, frowning a little. "Your
son's desk is over there, I believe. Yes."

George and Nettie had a bedtime conference about
these visits and Nettie told him, gently, that the
bond house head objected to friends and relatives
dropping in. It was against office rules. It had
been so when she was employed there. Strictly
business. She herself had gone there only once since
her marriage.

Well, that was all right. Business was like that
nowdays. Rush and grab and no time for anything.

The winter was a hard one, with a record snow-
fall and intense cold. He stayed indoors for days
together. A woman of his own age in like position
could have occupied herself usefully and happily.

52 GIGOLO

She could have hemmed a sash-curtain; knitted or
crocheted ; tidied a room ; taken a hand in the cook-
ing or preparing of food ; ripped an old gown ; made
over a new one; indulged in an occasional afternoon
festivity with women of her own years. But for old
man Minick there were no small tasks. There was
nothing he could do to make his place in the house-
hold justifiable. He wasn't even particularly good
at those small jobs of hammering, or painting, or
general "fixing." Nettie could drive a nail more
swiftly, more surely than he. "Now, Father, don't
you bother. I'll do it. Just you go and sit down.
Isn't it time for your afternoon nap?"

He waxed a little surly. "Nap ! I just got up.
I don't want to sleep my life away."

George and Nettie frequently had guests in the
evening. They played bridge, or poker, or talked.

"Come in, Father," George would say. "Come in.
You all know Dad, don't you, folks?" He would sit
down, uncertainly. At first he had attempted to
expound, as had been his wont in the old house on
Ellis. "I want to say, here and now, that this
country's got to . . ." But they went on,
heedless of him. They interrupted or refused,
politely, to listen. So he sat in the room, yet no
part of it. The young people's talk swirled and
eddied all about him. He was utterly lost in it.
Now and then Nettie or George would turn to him

OLD MAN MINICK 53

and with raised voice (he was not at all deaf and
prided himself on it) would shout, "It's about
this or that, Father. He was saying . . ."

When the group roared with laughter at a sally
from one of them he would smile uncertainly but
amiably, glancing from one to the other in complete
ignorance of what had passed, but not resenting it.
He took to sitting more and more in his kitchen
bedroom, smoking a comforting pipe and reading
and re-reading the evening paper. During that
winter he and Canary, the negro washwoman, be-
came quite good friends. She washed down in the
basement once a week but came up to the kitchen
for her massive lunch. A walrus-waisted black
woman, with a rich throaty voice, a rolling eye, and
a kindly heart. He actually waited for her appear-
ance above the laundry stairs.

"Weh, how's Mist* Minick to-day! Ah nev' did
see a gemun spry's you ah fo* yo' age. No, suh!
nev' did."

At this rare praise he would straighten his shoul-
ders and waggle his head. "I'm worth any ten of
these young sprats to-day." Canary would throw
back her head in a loud and companionable guffaw.

Nettie would appear at the kitchen swinging door.
"Canary's having her lunch, Father. Don't you
want to come into the front room with me? We'll
have our lunch in another half-hour."

54 GIGOLO

He followed her obediently enough. Nettie thought
of him as a troublesome and rather pathetic child —
a child who would never grow up. If she attributed
any thoughts to that fine old head they were ambling
thoughts, bordering, perhaps, on senility. Little
did she know how expertly this old one surveyed her
and how ruthlessly he passed judgment. She never
suspected the thoughts that formed in the active
brain.

He knew about women. He had married a wo-
man. He had had children by her. He looked at
this woman — his son's wife — moving about her little
five-room flat. She had theories about children.
He had heard her expound them. You didn't have
them except under such and such circumstances. It
wasn't fair otherwise. Plenty of money for their
education. Well. He and his wife had had three
children. Paul, the second, had died at thirteen.
A blow, that had been. They had not always planned
for the coming of the three but they always had
found a way, afterward. You managed, somehow,
once the little wrinkled red ball had fought its way
into the world. You managed. You managed.
Look at George! Yet when he was born, thirty-
nine years ago, Pa and Ma Minick had been hard
put to it.

Sitting there, while Nettie dismissed him as neg-
ligible, he saw her clearly, grimly. He looked at

OLD MAN MINICK 55

her. She was plump, but not too short, with a
generous width between the hips ; a broad full bosom,
but firm; round arms and quick slim legs; a fine
sturdy throat. The curve between arm and breast
made a graceful gracious line . . . Working in
a bond office . . . Working in a bond office
There was nothing in the Bible about work-
ing in a bond office. Here was a woman built for
child-bearing.

She thought him senile, negligible.

In March Nettie had in a sewing woman for a
week. She had her two or three times a year. A
hawk-faced woman of about forty-nine, with a blue-
bottle figure and a rapacious eye. She sewed in
the dining room and there was a pleasant hum of
machine and snip of scissors and murmur of con-
versation and rustle of silky stuff; and hot savoury
dishes for lunch. She and old man Minick became
great friends. She even let him take out bastings.
This when Nettie had gone out from two to four,
between fittings.

He chuckled and waggled his head. "I expect to
be paid regular assistant's wages for this," he said.

"I guess you don't need any wages, Mr. Minick,"
the woman said. "I guess you're pretty well fixed."

"Oh, well, I can't complain." (Five hundred a
year.)

"Complain ! I should say not ! If I was to com-

56 GIGOLO

plain it'd be different. Work all day to keep my-
self; and nobody to come home to at night."

"Widow, ma'am?"

"Since I was twenty. Work, work, that's all I've
had. And lonesome! I suppose you don't know
what lonesome is."

"Oh, don't I !" slipped from him. He had dropped
the bastings.

The sewing woman flashed a look at him from the
cold hard eye. "Well, maybe you do. I suppose
living here like this, with sons and daughters, ain't
so grand, for all your money. Now me, I've always
managed to keep my own little place that I could
call home, to come back to. It's only two rooms,
and nothing to rave about, but it's home. Evenings
I just cook and fuss around. Nobody to fuss for,
but I fuss, anyway. Cooking, that's what I love
to do. Plenty of good food, that's what folks need
to keep their strength up." Nettie's lunch that day
had been rather scant.

She was there a week. In Nettie's absence she
talked against her. He protested, but weakly. Did
she give him egg-noggs ? Milk ? Hot toddy ? Soup ?
Plenty of good rich gravy and meat and puddings?
Well! That's what folks needed when they weren't
so young any more. Not that he looked old. My,
no. Spryer than many young boys, and handsomer
than his own son if she did say so.

OLD MAN MINICK 57

He fed on it, hungrily. The third day she was
flashing meaning glances at him across the luncheon
table. The fourth she pressed his foot beneath the
table. The fifth, during Nettie's afternoon absence,
she got up, ostensibly to look for a bit of cloth which
she needed for sewing, and, passing him, laid a
caressing hand on his shoulder. Laid it there and
pressed his shoulder ever so little. He looked up,
startled. The glances across the luncheon had
largely passed over his head ; the foot beneath the
table might have been an accident. But this — this
was unmistakable. He stood up, a little shakily.
She caught his hand. The hawk-like face was close
to his.

"You need somebody to love you," she said.
"Somebody to do for you, and love you." The
hawk face came nearer. He leaned a little toward
it. But between it and his face was Ma Minick's
face, plump, patient, quizzical, kindly. His head
came back sharply. He threw the woman's hot
hand from him.

"Woman !" he cried. "Jezebel!"

The front door slammed. Nettie. The woman
flew to her sewing. Old man Minick, shaking, went
into his kitchen bedroom.

"Well," said Nettie, depositing her bundles on the
dining room table, "did you finish that faggoting?
Why, you haven't done so very much, have you !"

58 GIGOLO

"I ain't feeling so good," said the woman. "That
lunch didn't agree with me."

"Why, it was a good plain lunch. I don't see —

"Oh, it was plain enough, all right."

Next day she did not come to finish her work.
Sick, she telephoned. Nettie called it an outrage.
She finished the sewing herself, though she hated
sewing. Pa Minick said nothing, but there was a
light in his eye. Now and then he chuckled, to
Nettie's infinite annoyance, though she said noth-
ing.

"Wanted to marry me !" he said to himself, chuck-
ling. "Wanted to marry me! The old rip!"

At the end of April, Pa Minick discovered Wash-
ington Park, and the Club, and his whole life was
from that day transformed.

He had taken advantage of the early spring sun-
shine to take a walk, at Nettie's suggestion.

"Why don't you go into the Park, Father? It's
really warm out. And the sun's lovely. Do you
good."

He had put on his heaviest shirt, and a muffler,
and George's old red sweater with the great white
"C" on its front, emblem of George's athletic prow-
ess at the University of Chicago ; and over all, his
greatcoat. He had taken warm mittens and his
cane with the greyhound's head handle, carved. So
equipped he had ambled uninterestedly over to the

OLD MAN MINICK 59

Park across the way. And there he had found new
life.

New life in old life. For the park was full of
old men. Old men like himself, with greyhound's-
head canes, and mufflers and somebody's sweater
worn beneath their greatcoats. They wore arctics,
though the weather was fine. The skin of their
hands and cheek-bones was glazed and had a tight
look though it lay in fine little folds. There were
splotches of brown on the backs of their hands, and
on the temples and forehead. Their heavy grey or
brown socks made comfortable folds above their
ankles. From that April morning until winter
drew on the Park saw old man Minick daily. Not
only daily but by the day. Except for his meals,
and a brief hour for his after-luncheon nap, he
spent all his time there.

For in the park old man Minick and all the old
men gathered there found a Forum — a safety valve
— a means of expression. It did not take him long
to discover that the Park was divided into two
distinct sets of old men. There were the old men
who lived with their married sons and daughters-in-
law or married daughters and sons-in-law. Then
there were the old men who lived in the Grant Home
for Aged Gentlemen. You saw its fine red-brick
fa9ade through the trees at the edge of the Park.

And the slogan of these first was :

60 GIGOLO

"My son and my da'ter they wouldn't want me to
live in any public Home. No, sirree! They want
me right there with them. In their own home.
That's the kind of son and daughter I've got !"

The slogan of the second was:

"I wouldn't live with any son or daughter. In-
dependent. That's me. My own boss. Nobody
to tell me what I can do and what I can't. Treat
you like a child. I'm my own boss! Pay my own
good money and get my keep for it."

The first group, strangely enough, was likely to
be spotted of vest and a little frayed as to collar.
You saw them going on errands for their daughters-
in-law. A loaf of bread. Spool of white No. 100.
They took their small grandchildren to the duck
pond and between the two toddlers hand in hand —
the old and infirm and the infantile and infirm — it
was hard to tell which led which.

The second group was shiny as to shoes, spotless
as to linen, dapper as to clothes. They had no
small errands. Theirs was a magnificent leisure.
And theirs was magnificent conversation. The
questions they discussed and settled there in the
Park — these old men — were not international merely.
They were cosmic in scope.

The War? Peace? Disarmament? China? Free
love? Mere conversational bubbles to be tossed in
the air and disposed of in a burst of foam. Strong

OLD MAN MINICK 61

meat for old man Minick who had so long been fed
on pap. But he soon got used to it. Between four
and five in the afternoon, in a spot known as Under
The Willows, the meeting took the form of a club
— an open forum. A certain group made up of
Socialists, Free Thinkers, parlour anarchists, bol-
shevists, had for years drifted there for talk. Old
man Minick learned high-sounding phrases. "The
Masters . . . democracy . . . toil of the
many for the good of the few . . . the rul-
ing class . . . free speech . . . the Peo-
ple. . . ."

The strong-minded ones held forth. The weaker
ones drifted about on the outskirts, sometimes cling-
ing to the moist and sticky paw of a round-eyed
grandchild. Earlier in the day — at eleven o'clock,
say — the talk was not so general nor so inclusive.
The old men were likely to drift into groups of two
or three or four. They sat on sun-bathed benches
and their conversation was likely to be rather
smutty at times, for all they looked so mild and
patriarchal and desiccated. They paid scant heed
to the white-haired old women who, like themselves,
were sunning in the park. They watched the young
women switch by, with appreciative glances at their
trim figures and slim ankles. The day of the short
skirt was a grand time for them. They chuckled
among themselves and made wicked comment. One

62 GIGOLO

saw only white-haired, placid, tremulous old men,
but their minds still worked with belated masculinity
like naughty small boys talking behind the barn.

Old man Minick early achieved a certain leader-
ship in the common talk. He had always liked to
hold forth. This last year had been one of almost
unendurable bottling up. At first he had timidly
sought the less assertive ones of his kind. Mild old
men who sat in rockers in the pavilion waiting for
lunch time. Their conversation irritated him.
They remarked everything that passed before their
eyes.

"There's a boat. Fella with a boat."

A silence. Then, heavily : "Yeh."

Five minutes.

"Look at those people laying on the grass.
Shouldn't think it was warm enough for that . . .
Now they're getting up."

A group of equestrians passed along the bridle
path on the opposite side of the lagoon. They made
a frieze against the delicate spring greenery. The
coats of the women were scarlet, vivid green, arrest-
ing, stimulating.

"Riders."

"Yes."

"Good weather for riding."

A man was fishing near by. "Good weather for
fishing."

OLD MAN MINICK 63

"Yes."

"Wonder what time it is, anyway." From a
pocket, deep-buried, came forth a great gold blob
of a watch. "I've got one minute to eleven."

Old man Minick dragged forth a heavy globe.
"Mm. I've got eleven."

"Little fast, I guess."

Old man Minick shook off this conversation im-
patiently. This wasn't conversation. This was
oral death, though he did not put it thus. He
joined the other men. They were discussing Spirit-
ualism. He listened, ventured an opinion, was heard
respectfully and then combated mercilessly. He
rose to the verbal fight, and won it.

"Let's see," said one of the old men. "You're
not living at the Grant Home, are you?"

"No," old man Minick made reply, proudly. "I
live with my son and his wife. They wouldn't have
it any other way."

"Hm. Like to be independent myself."

"Lonesome, ain't it? Over there?"

"Lonesome! Say, Mr. — what'd you say your
name was? Minick? Mine's Hughes — I never was
lonesome in my life 'cept for six months when I
lived with my daughter and her husband and their
five children. Yes, sir. That's what I call lone-
some, in an eight-room flat."

George and Nettie said, "It's doing you good,

64 GIGOLO

Father, being out in the air so much." His eyes
were brighter, his figure straighter, his colour bet-
ter. It was that day he had held forth so elo-
quently on the emigration question. He had to
read a lot — papers and magazines and one thing and
another — to keep up. He devoured all the books and
pamphlets about bond issues and national finances
brought home by George. In the Park he was con-
sidered an authority on bonds and banking. He and
a retired real-estate man named Mowry sometimes
debated a single question for weeks. George and
Nettie, relieved, thought he ambled to the Park and
spent senile hours with his drooling old friends dis-
cussing nothing amiably and witlessly. This while
he was eating strong meat, drinking strong drink.

Summer sped. Was past. Autumn held a new
dread for old man Minick. When winter came
where should he go? Where should he go? Not
back to the five-room flat all day, and the little back
bedroom, and nothingness. In his mind there rang
a childish old song they used to sing at school. A
silly song:

Where do all the birdies go?
/ know. I know.

But he didn't know. He was terror-stricken.
October came and went. With the first of Novem-
ber the Park became impossible, even at noon, and
with two overcoats and the sweater. The first frost

OLD MAN MINICK 65

was a black frost for him. He scanned the heavens
daily for rain or snow. There was a cigar store and
billiard room on the corner across the boulevard and
there he sometimes went, with a few of his Park
cronies, to stand behind the players' chairs and
watch them at pinochle or rum. But this was a dull
business. Besides, the Grant men never came there.
They had card rooms of their own.

He turned away from this smoky little den on a
drab November day, sick at heart. The winter.
He tried to face it, and at what he saw he shrank and
was afraid.

He reached the apartment and went around to
the rear, dutifully. His rubbers were wet and muddy
and Nettie's living-room carpet was a fashionable
grey. The back door was unlocked. It was Can-
ary's day downstairs, he remembered. He took off
his rubbers in the kitchen and passed into the dining
room. Voices. Nettie had company. Some friends,
probably, for tea. He turned to go to his room, but
stopped at hearing his own name. Father Minick.
Father Minick. Nettie's voice.

"Of course, if it weren't for Father Minick I would
have. But how can we as long as he lives with us?
There isn't room. And we can't afford a bigger
place now, with rents what they are. This way it
wouldn't be fair to the child. We've talked it over,
George and I. Don't you suppose? But not as

66 GIGOLO

long as Father Minick is with us. I don't mean
we'd use the maid's room for a — for the — if we had
a baby. But I'd have to have someone in to help,
then, and we'd have to have that extra room."

He stood there in the dining room, quiet. Quiet.
His body felt queerly remote and numb, but his mind
was working frenziedly. Clearly, too, in spite of
the frenzy. Death. That was the first thought.
Death. It would be easy. But he didn't want to
die. Strange, but he didn't want to die. He liked
Life. The Park, the trees, the Club, the talk, the
whole show. . . . Nettie was a good girl . . .
The old must make way for the young. They had
the right to be born . . . Maybe it was just
another excuse. Almost four years married. Why
not three years ago? . . . The right to live.
The right to live.

He turned, stealthily, stealthily, and went back
into the kitchen, put on his rubbers, stole out into
the darkening November afternoon.

In an hour he was back. He entered at the
front door this time, ringing the bell. He had never
had a key. As if he were a child they would not
trust him with one. Nettie's women friends were
just leaving. In the air you smelled a mingling of
perfume, and tea, and cakes, and powder. He
sniffed it, sensitively.

"How do you do, Mr. Minick !" they said. "How

OLD MAN MINICK 67

are you! Well, you certainly look it. And how
do you manage these gloomy days?"

He smiled genially, taking off his greatcoat and
revealing the red sweater with the big white "C" on
it. "I manage. I manage." He puffed out his
cheeks. "I'm busy moving."

"Moving!" Nettie's startled eyes flew to his, held
them. "Moving, Father?"

"Old folks must make way for the young," he
said, gaily. "That's the law of life. Yes, sir!
New ones. New ones."

Nettie's face was scarlet. "Father, what in the
world "

"I signed over at the Grant Home to-day. Move
in next week." The women looked at her, smiling.
Old man Minick came over to her and patted her
plump arm. Then he pinched her smooth cheek with
a quizzical thumb and forefinger. Pinched it and
shook it ever so little.

"I don't know what you mean," said Nettie, out
of breath.

"Yes, you do," said old man Minick, and while
his tone was light and jesting there was in his old
face something stern, something menacing. "Yes,
you do."

When he entered the Grant Home a group of them
was seated about the fireplace in the main hall. A

68 GIGOLO

neat, ruddy, septuagenarian circle. They greeted
him casually, with delicacy of feeling, as if he were
merely approaching them at their bench in the Park.

"Say, Minick, look here. Mowry here says China
ought to have been included in the four-power
treaty. He says "

Old man Minick cleared his throat. "You take
China, now," he said, "with her vast and practically,
you might say, virgin country, why '

An apple-cheeked maid in a black dress and a
white apron stopped before him. He paused.

"Housekeeper says for me to tell you your room's
all ready, if you'd like to look at it now."

"Minute. Minute, my child." He waved her
aside with the air of one who pays five hundred a
year for independence and freedom. The girl turned
to go. "Uh — young lady ! Young lady !" She
looked at him. "Tell the housekeeper two pillows,
please. Two pillows on my bed. Be sure."

"Yes, sir. Two pillows. Yes, sir. I'll be sure.'*

GIGOLO

IN THE first place, gigolo is slang. In the sec-
ond place (with no desire to appear patro-
nizing, but one's French conversation class
does not include the argot), it is French slang. In
the third place, the gig is pronounced zhig, and the
whole is not a respectable word. Finally, it is a
term of utter contempt.

A gigolo, generally speaking, is a man who lives
off women's money. In the mad year 1922 A. W.,
a gigolo, definitely speaking, designated one of
those incredible and pathetic male creatures, born of
the war, who, for ten francs or more or even less,
would dance with any woman wishing to dance on the
crowded floors of public tea rooms, dinner or sup-
per rooms in the cafes, hotels, and restaurants of
France. Lean, sallow, handsome, expert, and un-
wholesome, one saw them everywhere, their slim
waists and sleek heads in juxtaposition to plump,
respectable American matrons and slender, respect-
able American flappers. For that matter, feminine
respectability of almost every nationality (except
the French) yielded itself to the skilful guidance

69

70 GIGOLO

of the genus gigolo in the tango or fox-trot. Nat-
urally, no decent French girl would have been al-
lowed for a single moment to dance with a gigolo.
But America, touring Europe like mad after years
of enforced absence, outnumbered all other nations
atravel ten to one.

By no feat of fancy could one imagine Gideon
Gory, of the Winnebago, Wisconsin, Gorys, em-
ployed daily and nightly as a gigolo in the gilt and
marble restaurants that try to outsparkle the Medi-
terranean along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
Gideon Gory, of Winnebago, Wisconsin! Why,
any one knows that the Gorys were to Winnebago
what the Romanoffs were to Russia — royal, remote,
omnipotent. Yet the Romanoffs went in the cata-
clysm, and so, too, did the Gorys. To appreciate
the depths to which the boy Gideon had fallen one
must have known the Gorys in' their glory. It hap-
pened something like this :

The Gorys lived for years in the great, ugly,
sprawling, luxurious old frame house on Cass Street.
It was high up on the bluff overlooking the Fox
River and, incidentally, the huge pulp and paper
mills across the river in which the Gory money had
been made. The Gorys were so rich and influential
(for Winnebago, Wisconsin) that they didn't bother
to tear down the old frame house and build a stone
one, or to cover its faded front with cosmetics of

GIGOLO 71

stucco. In most things the Gorys led where Win-
nebago could not follow. They disdained to follow
where Winnebago led. The Gorys had an auto-
mobile when those vehicles were entered from the
rear and when Winnebago roads were a wallow of
mud in the spring and fall and a snow-lined trench in
the winter. The family was of the town, and yet
apart from it. The Gorys knew about golf, and
played it in far foreign playgrounds when the rest of
us thought of it, if we thought of it at all, as some-
thing vaguely Scotch, like haggis. They had ori-
ental rugs and hardwood floors when the town still
stepped on carpets ; and by the time the rest of the
town had caught up on rugs the Gorys had gone
back to carpets, neutral tinted. They had fireplaces
in bedrooms, and used them, like characters in an
English noval. Old Madame Gory had a slim patent
leather foot, with a buckle, and carried a sunshade
when she visited the flowers in the garden. Old
Gideon was rumoured to have wine with his din-
ner. Gideon Junior (father of Giddy) smoked ciga-
rettes with his monogram on them. Shroeder's gro-
cery ordered endive for them, all blanched and
delicate in a wicker basket from France or Belgium,
when we had just become accustomed to head-
lettuce.

Every prosperous small American town has its
Gory family. Every small town newspaper relishes

72 GIGOLO

the savoury tid-bits that fall from the rich table of
the family life. Thus you saw that Mr. and Mrs.
Gideon Gory, Jr., have returned from California
where Mr. Gory had gone for the polo. Mr.
and Mrs. Gideon Gory, Jr., announce the birth,
in New York, of a son, Gideon III (our, in a manner
of speaking, hero). Mr. and Mrs. Gideon Gory,
Jr., and son Gideon III, left to-day for England and
the continent. It is understood that Gideon III
will be placed at school in England. Mr. and Mrs.
Gideon Gory, accompanied by Madame Gory, have
gone to Chicago for a week of the grand opera.

Born of all this, you would have thought that
young Giddy would grow up a somewhat objection-
able young man ; and so, in fact, he did, though
not nearly so objectionable as he might well have
been, considering things in general and his mother
in particular. At sixteen, for example, Giddy
was driving his own car — a car so exaggerated and
low-slung and with such a long predatory and glit-
tering nose that one marvelled at the expertness
with which he swung its slim length around the
corners of our narrow tree-shaded streets. He was
a real Gory, was Giddy, with his thick waving
black hair (which he tried for vain years to train
into docility), his lean swart face, and his slightly
hooked Gory nose. In appearance Winnebago pro-
nounced him foreign looking — an attribute which he

GIGOLO 73

later turned into a doubtful asset in Nice. On the
rare occasions when Giddy graced Winnebago with
his presence you were likely to find him pursuing
the pleasures that occupied other Winnebago boys
of his age, if not station. In some miraculous way
he had escaped being a snob. Still, training and
travel combined to lead him into many innocent
errors. When he dropped into Fetzer's pool shack
carrying a malacca cane, for example. He had
carried a cane every day for six months in Paris,
whence he had just returned. Now it was as much
a part of his street attire as his hat — more, to be
exact, for the hatless head had just then become the
street mode. There was a good game of Kelly in
progress. Giddy, leaning slightly on his stick,
stood watching it. Suddenly he was aware that all
about the dim smoky little room players and loung-
ers were standing in attitudes of exaggerated
elegance. Each was leaning on a cue, his elbow
crooked in as near an imitation of Giddy's posi-
tion as the stick's length would permit. The figure
was curved so that it stuck out behind and before;
the expression on each face was as asinine as its
owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell could
make it; the little finger of the free hand was ex-
travagantly bent. The players themselves walked
with a mincing step about the table. And: "My
deah fellah, what a pretty play. Mean to say, neat,

74 GIGOLO

don't you know," came incongruously from the lips
of Reddy Lennigan, whose father ran the Lennigan
House on Outagamie Street. He spatted his large
hands delicately together in further expression of
approval.

"Think so?" giggled his opponent, Mr. Dutchy
Meisenberg. "Aw — fly sweet of you to say so, old
thing." He tucked his unspeakable handkerchief
up his cuff and coughed behind his palm. He turned
to Giddy. "Excuse my not having my coat on,
deah boy."

Just here Giddy might have done a number of
things, all wrong. The game was ended. He
walked to the table, and, using the offending stick
as a cue, made a rather pretty shot that he had
learned from Benoit in London. Then he ranged
the cane neatly on the rack with the cues. He even
grinned a little boyishly. "You win," he said. "My
treat. What'll you have?"

Which was pretty sporting for a boy whose Ameri-
can training had been what Giddy's had been.

Giddy's father, on the death of old Gideon, proved
himself much more expert at dispensing the paper
mill money than at accumulating it. After old Ma-
dame Gory's death just one year following that of
her husband, Winnebago saw less and less of the
three remaining members of the royal family. The
frame house on the river bluff would be closed for a

GIGOLO 75

year or more at a time. Giddy's father rather liked
Winnebago and would have been content to spend six
months of the year in the old Gory house, but
Giddy's mother, who had been a Leyden, of New
York, put that idea out of his head pretty effectively.

"Don't talk to me," she said, "about your duty
toward the town that gave you your money and all
that kind of feudal rot because you know you don't
mean it. It bores you worse than it does me, really,
but you like to think that the villagers are pulling a
forelock when you walk down Normal Avenue. As a
matter of fact they're not doing anything of the
kind. They've got their thumbs to their noses,
more likely."

Her husband protested rather weakly. "I don't
care. I like the old shack. I know the heating appa-
ratus is bum and that we get the smoke from the
paper mills, but — I don't know — last year, when
we had that punk pink palace at Cannes I kept
thinking

Mrs. Gideon Gory raised the Leyden eyebrow.
"Don't get sentimental, Gid, for God's sake! It's
a shanty, and you know it. And you know that it
needs everything from plumbing to linen. I don't
see any sense in sinking thousands in making it
livable when we don't want to live in it."

"But I do want to live in it — once in a while. I'm
used to it. I was brought up in it. So was the kid.

76 GIGOLO

He likes it, too. Don't you, Giddy ?" The boy was
present, as usual, at this particular scene.

The boy worshipped his mother. But, also, he
was honest. So, "Yeh, I like the ol' barn all right,"
he confessed.

Encouraged, his father went on : "Yesterday the
kid was standing out there on the bluff-edge breath-
ing like a whale, weren't you, Giddy? And when
I asked him what he was puffing about he said he
liked the smell of the sulphur and chemicals and stuff
from the paper mills, didn't you, kid?"

Shame-facedly, "Yeh," said Giddy.

Betrayed thus by husband and adored son, the
Leyden did battle. "You can both stay here, then,"
she retorted with more spleen than elegance, "and
sniff sulphur until you're black in the face. I'm
going to London in May."

They, too, went to London in May, of course, as
she had known they would. She had not known,
though, that in leading her husband to England in
May she was leading him to his death as well.

"All Winnebago will be shocked and grieved to
learn," said the Winnebago Courier to the extent
of two columns and a cut, "of the sudden and violent
death in England of her foremost citizen, Gideon
Gory. Death was due to his being thrown from his
horse while hunting."

. . . To being thrown from his horse while

GIGOLO 77

hunting. Shocked and grieved though it might or
might not be, Winnebago still had the fortitude to
savour this with relish. Winnebago had died deaths
natural and unnatural. It had been run over by
automobiles, and had its skull fractured at football,
and been drowned in Lake Winnebago, and struck by
lightning, and poisoned by mushrooms, and shot
by burglars. But never had Winnebago citizen
had the distinction of meeting death by being thrown
from his horse while hunting. While hunting.
Scarlet coats. Hounds in full cry. Baronial halls.
Hunt breakfasts. Vogue. Vanity Fair.

Well ! Winnebago was almost grateful for this
final and most picturesque gesture of Gideon Gory
the second.

The widowed Leyden did not even take the trouble
personally to superintend the selling of the Gory
place on the river bluff. It was sold by an agent
while she and Giddy were in Italy, and if she was ever
aware that the papers in the transaction stated that
the house had been bought by Orson J. Hubbell she
soon forgot the fact and the name. Giddy, leaning
over her shoulder while she handled the papers, and
signing on the line indicated by a legal forefinger,
may have remarked:

"Hubbell. That's old Hubbell, the dray man.
Must be money in the draying line."

Which was pretty stupid of him, because he should

78 GIGOLO

have known that the draying business was now devel-
oped into the motor truck business with great vans
roaring their way between Winnebago and Kau-
kauna, Winnebago and Neenah, and even Winnebago
and Oshkosh. He learned that later.

Just now Giddy wasn't learning much of anything,
and, to do him credit, the fact distressed him not a
little. His mother insisted that she needed him, and
developed a bad heart whenever he rebelled and
threatened to sever the apron-strings. They lived
abroad entirely now. Mrs. Gory showed a talent for
spending the Gory gold that must have set old
Gideon to whirling in his Winnebago grave. Her
spending of it was foolish enough, but her handling
of it was criminal. She loved Europe. America
bored her. She wanted to identify herself with
foreigners, with foreign life. Against advice she
sold her large and lucrative interest in the Winne-
bago paper mills and invested great sums in French
stocks, in Russian enterprises, in German shares.

She liked to be mistaken for a French woman.

She and Gideon spoke the language like natives —
or nearly.

She was vain of Gideon's un-American looks, and
cross with him when, on their rare and brief visits
to New York, he insisted that he liked American
tailoring and American-made shoes. Once or twice,
soon after his father's death, he had said, casually,

GIGOLO 79

"You didn't like Winnebago, did you? Living in
it, I mean."

"Like it !"

"Well, these English, I mean, and French — they
sort of grow up in a place, and stay with it and be-
long to it, see what I mean? and it gives you a kind
of permanent feeling. Not patriotic, exactly, but
solid and native heathy and Scots-wha-hae-wi'-Wal-
lace and all that kind of slop."

"Giddy darling, don't be silly."

Occasionally, too, he said, "Look here, Julia" —
she liked this modern method of address — "look here,
Julia, I ought to be getting busy. Doing something.
Here I am, nineteen, and I can't do a thing except
dance pretty well, but not as well as that South
American eel we met last week ; mix a cocktail pretty
well, but not as good a one as Benny the bartender
turns out at Voyot's; ride pretty well, but not as
well as the English chaps ; drive a car "

She interrupted him there. "Drive a car better
than even an Italian chauffeur. Had you there,
Giddy darling."

She undoubtedly had Giddy darling there. His
driving was little short of miraculous, and his feel-
ing for the intricate inside of a motor engine was
as delicate and unerring as that of a professional
pianist for his pet pianoforte. They motored a
good deal, with France as a permanent background

80 GIGOLO

and all Europe as a playground. They flitted about
the continent, a whirl of glittering blue-and-cream
enamel, tan leather coating, fur robes, air cushions,
gold-topped flasks, and petrol. Giddy knew Como
and Villa D'Este as the place where that pretty
Hungarian widow had borrowed a thousand lires
from him at the Casino roulette table and never paid
him back; London as a pleasing potpourri of briar
pipes, smart leather gloves, music-hall revues, and
night clubs ; Berlin as a rather stuffy hole where
they tried to ape Paris and failed, but you had to
hand it to Charlotte when it came to the skating at
the Eis Palast. A pleasing existence, but unprof-
itable. No one saw the cloud gathering because of
cloud there was none, even of the man's-hand size
so often discerned as a portent.

When the storm broke (this must be hurriedly
passed over because of the let's-not-talk-about-
the-war-Fm-so-sick-of-it-aren't-you feeling) Giddy
promptly went into the Lafayette Escadrille. Later
he learned never to mention this to an American
because the American was so likely to say, "There
must have been about eleven million scrappers in
that outfit. Every fella you meet's been in the La-
fayette Escadrille. If all the guys were in it that
say they were they could have licked the Germans the
first day out. That outfit's worse than the old
Floradora Sextette."

GIGOLO 81

Mrs. Gory was tremendously proud of him, and
not as worried as she should have been. She thought
it all a rather smart game, and not at all serious.
She wasn't even properly alarmed about her Euro-
pean money, at first. Giddy looked thrillingly dis-
tinguished and handsome in his aviation uniform.
When she walked in the Paris streets with him she
glowed like a girl with her lover. But after the first
six months of it Mrs. Gory, grown rather drawn
and haggard, didn't think the whole affair quite so
delightful. She scarcely ever saw Giddy. She
never heard the drum of an airplane without getting
a sick, gone feeling at the pit of her stomach. She
knew, now, that there was more to the air service
than a becoming uniform. She was doing some war
work herself in an incompetent, frenzied sort of
way. With Giddy soaring high and her foreign
stocks and bonds falling low she might well be ex-
cused for the panic that shook her from the time she
opened her eyes in the morning until she tardily
closed them at night.

"Let's go home, Giddy darling," like a scared
child.

"Where's that?"

"Don't be cruel. America's the only safe place
now."

"Too darned safe!" This was 1915.

By 1917 she was actually in need of money. But

82 GIGOLO

Giddy did not know much about this because Giddy
had, roughly speaking, got his. He had the habit
of soaring up into the sunset and sitting around in
a large pink cloud like a kid bouncing on a feather
bed. Then, one day, he soared higher and farther
than he knew, having, perhaps, grown careless
through over-confidence. He heard nothing above
the roar of his own engine, and the two planes were
upon him almost before he knew it. They were not
French, or English, or American planes. He got
one of them and would have got clean away if the
other had not caught him in the arm. The right arm.
His mechanician lay limp. Even then he might have
managed a landing but the pursuing plane got in
a final shot. There followed a period of time that
seemed to cover, say, six years but that was actually
only a matter of seconds. At the end of that period
Giddy, together with a tangle of wire, silk, wood,
and something that had been the mechanician, lay in-
side the German lines, and you would hardly have
thought him worth the disentangling.

They did disentangle him, though, and even
patched him up pretty expertly, but not so expertly,
perhaps, as they might have, being enemy surgeons
and rather busy with the patching of their own in-
jured. The bone, for example, in the lower
right arm, knitted promptly and properly, being a
young and healthy bone, but they rather over-

GIGOLO 83

looked the matter of arm nerves and muscles, so that
later, though it looked a perfectly proper arm, it
couldn't lift four pounds. His head had emerged
slowly, month by month, from swathings of gauze.
What had been quite a crevasse in his skull became
only a scarlet scar that his hair pretty well hid when
he brushed it over the bad place. But the surgeon,
perhaps being overly busy, or having no real way
of knowing that Giddy's nose had been a distin-
guished and aristocratically hooked Gory nose, had
remoulded that wrecked feature into a pure Greek
line at first sight of which Giddy stood staring
weakly into the mirror ; reeling a little with surprise
and horror and unbelief and general misery. "Can
this be I?" he thought, feeling like the old woman
of the bramble bush in the Mother Goose rhyme.
A well-made and becoming nose, but not so fine look-
ing as the original feature had been, as worn by
Giddy.

"Look here !" he protested to the surgeon, months
too late. "Look here, this isn't my nose."

"Be glad," replied that practical Prussian person,
"that you have any."

With his knowledge of French and English and
German Giddy acted as interpreter during the
months of his invalidism and later internment, and
things were not so bad with him. He had no news
of his mother, though, and no way of knowing

84 GIGOLO

whether she had news of him. With 1918, and
the Armistice and his release, he hurried to Paris
and there got the full impact of the past year's
events.

Julia Gory was dead and the Gory money non-
existent.

Out of the ruins — a jewel or two and some paper
not quite worthless — he managed a few thousand
francs and went to Nice. There he walked in the
sunshine, and sat in the sunshine, and even danced in
the sunshine, a dazed young thing together with
hundreds of other dazed young things, not think-
ing, not planning, not hoping. Existing only in
a state of semi-consciousness like one recovering from
a blinding blow. The francs dribbled away. Some-
times he played baccarat and won; oftener he
played baccarat and lost. He moved in a sort of
trance, feeling nothing. Vaguely he knew that there
was a sort of Conference going on in Paris. Some-
times he thought of Winnebago, recalling it re-
motely, dimly, as one is occasionally conscious of
a former unknown existence. Twice he went to
Paris for periods of some months, but he was un-
happy there and even strangely bewildered, like a
child. He was still sick in mind and body, though
he did not know it. Driftwood, like thousands of
others, tossed up on the shore after the storm ; lying
there bleached and useless and battered.

GIGOLO 85

Then, one day in Nice, there was no money. Not
a franc. Not a centime. He knew hunger. He
knew terror. He knew desperation. It was out
of this period that there emerged Giddy, the gigolo.
Now, though, the name bristled with accent marks,
thus: Gedeon Gore.

This Gedeon Gore, of the Nice dansants, did not
even remotely resemble Gideon Gory of Winnebago,
Wisconsin. This Gedeon Gore wore French clothes
of the kind that Giddy Gory had always despised.
A slim, sallow, sleek, sad-eyed gigolo in tight French
garments, the pants rather flappy at the ankle;
effeminate French shoes with fawn-coloured uppers
and patent-leather eyelets and vamps, most des-
picable; a slim cane; hair with a magnificent nat-
ural wave that looked artificially marcelled and
that was worn with a strip growing down from the
temples on either side in the sort of cut used only
by French dandies and English stage butlers. No,
this was not Giddy Gory. The real Giddy Gory lay
in a smart but battered suitcase under the narrow
bed in his lodgings. The suitcase contained :

Item; one grey tweed suit with name of a London
tailor inside.

Item; one pair Russia calf oxfords of American
make.

Item; one French aviation uniform with leather
coat, helmet, and gloves all bearing stiff and curious

86 GIGOLO

splotches of brown or rust-colour which you might
not recognize as dried blood stains.

Item; one handful assorted medals, ribbons, or-
ders, etc.

All Europe was dancing. It seemed a death
dance, grotesque, convulsive, hideous. Paris, Nice,
Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Vienna, London writhed
and twisted and turned and jiggled. St. Vitus him-
self never imagined contortions such as these. In
the narrow side-street dance rooms of Florence,
and in the great avenue restaurants of Paris they
were performing exactly the same gyrations — wig-
gle, squirm, shake. And over all the American jazz
music boomed and whanged its syncopation. On the
music racks of violinists who had meant to be Elmans
or Kreislers were sheets entitled Jazz Baby Fox
Trot. Drums, horns, cymbals, castanets, sand-
paper. So the mannequins and marionettes of Europe
tried to whirl themselves into forget fulness.

The Americans thought Giddy was a French-
man. The French knew him for an American, dress
as he would. Dancing became with him a profes-
sion— no, a trade. He danced flawlessly, holding
and guiding his partner impersonally, firmly, ex-
pertly in spite of the weak right arm — it served
well enough. Gideon Gory had always been a nat-
urally rhythmic dancer. Then, too, he had been
fond of dancing. Years of practise had perfected

GIGOLO 87

him. He adopted now the manner and position
of the professional. As he danced he held his head
rather stiffly to one side, and a little down, the chin
jutting out just a trifle. The effect was at the same
time stiff and chic. His footwork was infallible.
The intricate and imbecilic steps of the day he
performed in flawless sequence. Under his masterly
guidance the feet of the least rhythmic were sud-
denly endowed with deftness and grace. One
swayed with him as naturally as with an elemental
force. He danced politely and almost wordlessly
unless first addressed, according to the code of his
kind. His touch was firm, yet remote. The dance
concluded, he conducted his partner to her seat,
bowed stiffly from the waist, heels together, and
departed. For these services he was handed ten
francs, twenty francs, thirty francs, or more, if
lucky, depending on the number of times he was
called upon to dance with a partner during the
evening. Thus was dancing, the most spontaneous
and unartificial of the Muses, vulgarized, commercial-
ized, prostituted. Lower than Gideon Gory, of Win-
nebago, Wisconsin, had fallen, could no man fall.

Sometimes he danced in Paris. During the high
season he danced in Nice. Afternoon and evening
found him busy in the hot, perfumed, overcrowded
dance salons. The Negresco, the Ruhl, Maxim's,
Belle Meuniere, the Casina Municipale. He learned

88 GIGOLO

to make his face go a perfect blank — pale, cryptic,
expressionless. Between himself and the other
boys of his ilk there was little or no profes-
sional comradeship. A weird lot they were, young,
though their faces were strangely lacking in the look
of youth. All of them had been in the war. Most
of them had been injured. There was Aubin, the
Frenchman. The left side of Aubin's face was
rather startlingly handsome in its Greek perfection.
It was like a profile chiselled. The left side was an-
other face — the same, and yet not the same. It was
as though you saw the left side out of drawing, or
blurred, or out of focus. It puzzled you — shocked
you. The left side of Aubin's face had been done
over by an army surgeon who, though deft and
scientific, had not had a hand expert as that of
the Original Sculptor. Then there was Mazzetti,
the Roman. He parted his hair on the wrong side,
and under the black wing of it was a deep groove
into which you could lay a forefinger. A piece of
shell had plowed it neatly. The Russian boy who
called himself Orloff had the look in his eyes of
one who has seen things upon which eyes never
should have looked. He smoked constantly and
ate, apparently, not at all. Among these there
existed a certain unwritten code and certain un-
written signals.

You did not take away the paying partner of

GIGOLO 89

a fellow gigolo. If in too great demand you turned
jour surplus partners over to gigolos unemployed.
You did not accept less than ten francs (they all
broke this rule). Sometimes Gedeon Gore made ten
francs a day, sometimes twenty, sometimes fifty,
infrequently a hundred. Sometimes not enough to
pay for his one decent meal a day. At first he
tried to keep fit by walking a certain number of
miles daily along the ocean front. But usually
he was too weary to persist in this. He did not
think at all. He felt nothing. Sometimes, down
deep, deep in a long-forgotten part of his being
a voice called feebly, plaintively to the man who
had been Giddy Gory. But he shut his ears and
mind and consciousness and would not listen.

The American girls were best, the gigolos all
agreed, and they paid well, though they talked too
much. Gedeon Gore was a favourite among them.
They thought he was so foreign looking, and kind
of sad and stern and everything. His French,
fluent, colloquial, and bewildering, awed them. They
would attempt to speak to him in halting and hack-
neyed phrases acquired, during three years at Miss
Pence's Select School at Hastings-on-the-Hudson.
At the cost of about a thousand dollars a word
they would enunciate, painfully:

"Je pense que — um — que Nice eat le plus belle —
uh — ville de France."

90 GIGOLO

Giddy, listening courteously, his head inclined as
though unwilling to miss one conversational pearl
falling from the pretty American's lips, would ap-
pear to consider this gravely. Then, sometimes in
an unexpected burst of pure mischief, he would
answer :

"You said something ! Some burg, I'm telling the
world."

The girl, startled, would almost leap back from
the confines of his arms only to find his face stern,
immobile, his eyes sombre and reflective.

"Why! Where did you pick that up?"

His eyebrows would go up. His face would ex-
press complete lack of comprehension. "Pardon?"

Afterward, at home, in Toledo or Kansas City
or Los Angeles, the girl would tell about it. "I
suppose some American girl taught it to him,
just for fun. It sounded too queer — because his
French was so wonderful. He danced divinely. A
Frenchman, and so aristocratic ! Think of his being
a professional partner. They have them over there,
you know. Everybody's dancing in Europe. And
gay! Why, you'd never know there'd been a war."

Mary Hubbell, of the Winnebago Hubbells, did
not find it so altogether gay. Mary Hubbell, with
her father, Orson J. Hubbell, and her mother, Bee
Hubbell, together with what appeared to be prac-
tically the entire white population of the United

GIGOLO 91

States, came to Europe early in 1922, there to
travel, to play, to rest, to behold, and to turn their
good hard American dollars into cordwood-size bun-
dles of German marks, Austrian kronen, Italian
lires, and French francs. Most of the men regarded
Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography
Rheims, Rhine, Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or
Wiirzburg were not localities but libations. The
women, for the most part, went in for tortoise-shell
combs, fringed silk shawls, jade earrings, beaded
bags, and coral neck chains. Up and down the
famous thoroughfare of Europe went the absurd
pale blue tweed tailleurs and the lavender tweed
cape suits of America's wives and daughters.
Usually, after the first month or two, they shed these
respectable, middle-class habiliments for what they
fondly believed to be smart Paris costumes ; and
you could almost invariably tell a good, moral,
church-going matron of the Middle West by the
fact that she was got up like a demimondaine of the
second class, in the naive belief that she looked
French and chic.

The three Hubbells were thoroughly nice people.
Mary Hubbell was more than thoroughly nice. She
was a darb. She had done a completely good job
during the 1918—1918 period, including the expert
driving of a wild and unbroken Ford up and down
the shell-torn roads of France. One of those small-

92 GIGOLO

town girls with a big-town outlook, a well-trained
mind, a slim boyish body, a good clear skin, and a
steady eye that saw. Mary Hubbell wasn't a
beauty by a good many measurements, but she had
her points, as witness the number of bouquets,
bundles, books, and bon-bons piled in her cabin when
she sailed.

The well-trained mind and the steady seeing eye
enabled Mary Hubbell to discover that Europe
wasn't so gay as it seemed to the blind; and she
didn't write home to the effect that you'd never
know there'd been war.

The Hubbells had the best that Europe could
afford. Orson J. Hubbell, a mild-mannered, grey-
haired man with a nice flat waist-line and a good
keen eye (hence Mary's) adored his women-folk and
spoiled them. During the first years of his married
life he had been Hubbell, the drayman, as Giddy
Gory had said. He had driven one of his three
drays himself, standing sturdily in the front of
the red-painted wooden two-horse wagon as it rat-
tled up and down the main business thoroughfare of
Winnebago. But the war and the soaring freight-
rates had dealt generously with Orson Hubbell. As
railroad and shipping difficulties increased the Hub-
bell draying business waxed prosperous. Factories,
warehouses, and wholesale business firms could be
assured that their goods would arrive promptly,

GIGOLO 93

safely, and cheaply when conveyed by a Hubbell van.
So now the three red-painted wooden horse-driven
drays were magically transformed into a great fleet
of monster motor vans that plied up and down the
state of Wisconsin and even into Michigan and E-
linois and Indiana. The Orson J. Hubbell Trans-
portation Company, you read. And below, in yel-
low lettering on the red background :

Have HUBBELL Do Your HAULING.

There was actually a million in it, and more to
come. The buying of the old Gory house on the
river bluff had been one of the least of Orson's feats.
And now that house was honeycombed with sleeping
porches and linen closets and enamel fittings and
bathrooms white and glittering as an operating
auditorium. And there were shower baths, and blue
rugs, and great soft fuzzy bath towels and little
white innocent guest towels embroidered with curly
H's whose tails writhed at you from all corners.

Orson J. and Mrs. Hubbell had never been in
Europe before, and they enjoyed themselves enor-
mously. That is to say, Mrs. Orson J. did, and
Orson, seeing her happy, enjoyed himself vicariously.
His hand slid in and out of his inexhaustible pocket
almost automatically now. And "How much?"
was his favourite locution. They went everywhere,
did everything. Mary boasted a pretty fair French.

94. GIGOLO

Mrs. Hubbell conversed in the various languages
of Europe by speaking pidgin English very loud,
and omitting all verbs, articles, adverbs, and other
cumbersome superfluities. Thus, to the file de
chambre.

"Me out now you beds." The red-cheeked one
from the provinces understood, in some miraculous
way, that Mrs. Hubbell was now going out and that
the beds could be made and the rooms tidied.

They reached Nice in February and plunged into
its gaieties. "Just think !" exclaimed Mrs. Hub-
bell rapturously, "only three francs for a facial
or a manicure and two for a marcel. It's like find-
ing them."

"If the Mediterranean gets any bluer," said Mary,
"I don't think I can stand it, it's so lovely."

Mrs. Hubbell, at tea, expressed a desire to dance.
Mary, at tea, desired to dance but didn't express
it. Orson J. loathed tea ; and the early draying
business had somewhat unfitted his sturdy legs for
the lighter movements of the dance. But he wanted
only their happiness. So he looked about a bit,
and asked some questions, and came back.

"Seems there's a lot of young chaps who make
a business of dancing with the women-folks who
haven't dancing men along. Hotel hires 'em. Funny
to us but I guess it's all right, and quite the thing
around here. You pay 'em so much a dance,

GIGOLO 95

or so much an afternoon. You girls want to try
it?"

"I do," said Mrs. Orson J. Hubbell. "It doesn't
sound respectable. Then that's what all those thin
little chaps are who have been dancing with those
pretty American girls. They're sort of ratty look-
ing, aren't they? What do they call 'em? That's
a nice-looking one, over there — no, no! — dancing
with the girl in grey, I mean. If that's one I'd
like to dance with him, Orson. Good land, what
would the Winnebago ladies say! What do they
call 'em, I wonder."

Mary had been gazing very intently at the nice-
looking one over there who was dancing with the
girl in grey. She answered her mother's question,
still gazing at him. "They call them gigolos," she
said, slowly. Then, "Get that one Dad, will you,
if you can? You dance with him first, Mother, and
then I'll "

"I can get two," volunteered Orson J.

"No," said Mary Hubbell, sharply.

The nice-looking gigolo seemed to be in great
demand, but Orson J. succeeded in capturing him
after the third dance. It turned out to be a tango,
and though Mrs. Hubbell, pretty well scared, de-
clared that she didn't know it and couldn't dance it,
the nice-looking gigolo assured her, through the
medium of Mary's interpretation, that Mrs. Hubbell

96 GIGOLO

had only to follow his guidance. It was quite simple.
He did not seem to look directly at Mary, or at
Orson J. or at Mrs. Hubbell, as he spoke. The
dance concluded, Mrs. Hubbell came back breath-
less, but enchanted.

"He has beautiful manners," she said, aloud, in
English. "And dance! You feel like a swan when
you're dancing with him. Try him, Mary." The
gigolo's face, as he bowed before her, was impassive,
inscrutable.

But, "Sh!" said Mary.

"Nonsense! Doesn't understand a word."

Mary danced the next dance with him. They
danced wordlessly until the dance was half over.
Then, abruptly, Mary said in English, "What's
your name?"

Close against him she felt a sudden little sharp
contraction of the gigolo's diaphragm — the contrac-
tion that reacts to surprise or alarm. But he
said, in French, "Pardon?"

So, "What's your name?" said Mary, in French
this time.

The gigolo with the beautiful manners hesitated
longer than really beautiful manners should permit.
But finally, "Je m'appelle Gedeon Gore." He pro-
nounced it in his most nasal, perfect Paris French.
It didn't sound even remotely like Gideon Gory.

"My name's Hubbell," said Mary, in her pretty

GIGOLO 97

fair French. "Mary Hubbell. I come from a little
town called Winnebago."

The Gore eyebrow expressed polite disinterested-
ness.

"That's in Wisconsin," continued Mary, "and I
love it."

"Naturellement" agreed the gigolo, stiffly.

They finished the dance without further conversa-
tion. Mrs. Hubbell had the next dance. Mary
the next. They spent the afternoon dancing, until
dinner time. Orson J.'s fee, as he handed it
to the gigolo, was the kind that mounted grandly
into dollars instead of mere francs. The gigolo's
face, as he took it, was not more inscrutable than
Mary's as she watched him take it.

From that afternoon, throughout the next two
weeks, if any girl as thoroughly fine as Mary Hub-
bell could be said to run after any man, Mary ran
after that gigolo. At the same time one could almost
have said that he tried to avoid her. Mary took a
course of tango lessons, and urged her mother to
do the same. Even Orson J. noticed it.

"Look here," he said, in kindly protest. "Aren't
you getting pretty thick with this jigger?"

"Sociological study, Dad. I'm all right."

"Yeh, you're all right. But how about him?"

"He's all right, too."

The gigolo resisted Mary's unmaidenly advances,

98 GIGOLO

and yet, when he was with her, he seemed sometimes
to forget to look sombre and blank and remote.
They seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Mary
talked about America a good deal. About her home
town . . . "and big elms and maples and oaks
in the yard . . . the Fox River valley
Middle West . . . Normal Avenue . . .
Cass Street . . . Fox River paper mills . . ."

She talked in French and English. The gigolo
confessed, one day, to understanding some English,
though he seemed to speak none. After that Mary,
when very much in earnest, or when enthusiastic,
spoke in her native tongue altogether. She claimed
an intense interest in European after-war condi-
tions, in reconstruction, in the attitude toward life
of those millions of young men who had actually
participated in the conflict. She asked questions
that might have been considered impertinent, not to
say nervy.

"Now you," she said, brutally, "are a person of
some education, refinement, and background. Yet
you are content to dance around in these — these —
well, back home a chap might wash dishes in a cheap
restaurant or run an elevator in an east side New
York loft building, but he'd never "

A very faint dull red crept suddenly over the
pallor of the gigolo's face. They were sitting out
on a bench on the promenade, facing the ocean (in

GIGOLO 99

direct defiance on Mary's part of all rules of con-
duct of respectable girls toward gigolos). Mary
Hubbell had said rather brusque things before. But
now, for the first time, the young man defended him-
self faintly.

"For us," he replied in his exquisite French, "it
is finished. For us there is nothing. This genera-
tion, it is no good. I am no good. They are no
good." He waved a hand in a gesture that included
the promenaders, the musicians in the cafes, the
dancers, the crowds eating and drinking at the little
tables lining the walk.

"What rot !" said Mary Hubbell, briskly. "They
probably said exactly the same thing in Asia after
Alexander had got through with 'em. I suppose
there was such dancing and general devilment in
Macedonia that every one said the younger genera-
tion had gone to the dogs since the war, and the
world would never amount to anything again. But
it seemed to pick up, didn't it ?"

The boy turned and looked at her squarely for the
first time, his eyes meeting hers. Mary looked at
him. She even swayed toward him a little, her
lips parted. There was about her a breathlessness,
an expectancy. So they sat for a moment, and be-
tween them the air was electric, vibrant. Then,
slowly, he relaxed, sat back, slumped a little on the
bench. Over his face, that for a moment had been

100 GIGOLO

alight with something vital, there crept again the
look of defeat, of sombre indifference. At sight of
that look Mary Hubbell's jaw set. She leaned for-
ward. She clasped her fine large hands tight. She
did not look at the gigolo, but out, across the blue
Mediterranean, and beyond it. Her voice was low
and a little tremulous and she spoke in English only.
"It isn't finished here — here in Europe. But it's
sick. Back home, in America, though, it's alive.
Alive! And growing. I wish I could make you
understand what it's like there. It's all new, and
crude, maybe, and ugly, but it's so darned healthy
and sort of clean. I love it. I love every bit of it.
I know I sound like a flag-waver but I don't care.
I mean it. And I know it's sentimental, but I'm
proud of it. The kind of thing I feel about the
United States is the kind of thing Mencken sneers
at. You don't know who Mencken is. He's a critic
who pretends to despise everything because he's
really a sentimentalist and afraid somebody'll find
it out. I don't say I don't appreciate the beauty
of all this Italy and France and England and Ger-
many. But it doesn't get me the way just the men-
tion of a name will get me back home. This trip, for
example. Why, last summer four of us — three
other girls and I — motored from Wisconsin to Cali-
fornia, and we drove every inch of the way ourselves.
The Santa Fe Trail! The Ocean-to-Ocean High-

GIGOLO 101

way ! The Lincoln Highway ! The Dixie Highway !
The Yellowstone Trail! The very sound of those
words gives me a sort of prickly feeling. They mean
something so big and vital and new. I get a thrill
out of them that I haven't had once over here.
Why even this," she threw out a hand that included
and dismissed the whole sparkling panorama before
her, "this doesn't begin to give the jolt that I got
out of Walla Walla, and Butte, and Missoula, and
Spokane, and Seattle, and Albuquerque. We drove
all day, and ate ham and eggs at some little hotel
or lunch-counter at night, and outside the hotel
the drummers would be sitting, talking and smok-
ing; and there were Western men, very tanned and
tall and lean, in those big two-gallon hats and khaki
pants and puttees. And there were sunsets, and sand,
and cactus and mountains, and campers and Fords.
I can smell the Kansas corn fields and I can see the
Iowa farms and the ugly little raw American towns,
and the big thin American men, and the grain eleva-
tors near the railroad stations, and I know those
towns weren't the way towns ought to look. They
were ugly and crude and new. Maybe it wasn't all
beautiful, but gosh ! it was real, and growing, and big
and alive! Alive!"

Mary Hubbell was crying. There, on the bench
along the promenade in the sunshine at Nice, she
was crying.

102 GIGOLO

The boy beside her suddenly rose, uttered a little
inarticulate sound, and left her there on the bench
in the sunshine. Vanished, completely, in the crowd.

For three days the Orson J. Hubbells did not see
their favourite gigolo. If Mary was disturbed she
did not look it, though her eye was alert in the
throng. During the three days of their gigolo's
absence Mrs. Hubbell and Mary availed themselves
of the professional services of the Italian gigolo
Mazzetti. Mrs. Hubbell said she thought his danc-
ing was, if anything, more nearly perfect than that
What's-his-name, but his manner wasn't so nice and
she didn't like his eyes. Sort of sneaky. Mary
said she thought so, too.

Nevertheless she was undoubtedly affable toward
him, and talked (in French) and laughed and even
walked with him, apparently in complete ignorance
of the fact that these things were not done. Maz-
zetti spoke frequently of his colleague, Gore, and al-
ways in terms of disparagement. A low fellow. A
clumsy dancer. One unworthy of Mary's swanlike
grace. Unfit to receive Orson J. Hubbell's generous
fees.

Late one evening, during the mid-week after-din-
ner dance, Gore appeared suddenly in the doorway.
It was ten o'clock. The Hubbells were dallying
with their after-dinner coffee at one of the small
tables about the dance floor.

GIGOLO 103

Mary, keen-eyed, saw him first. She beckoned
Mazzetti who stood in attendance beside Mrs. Hub-
bell's chair. She snatched up the wrap that lay
at hand and rose. "It's stifling in here. I'm going
out on the Promenade for a breath of air. Come
on." She plucked at Mazzetti's sleeve and actually
propelled him through the crowd and out of the
room. She saw Gore's startled eyes follow them.

She even saw him crossing swiftly to where her
mother and father sat. Then she vanished into the
darkness with Mazzetti. And the Mazzettis put but
one interpretation upon a young woman who strolls
into the soft darkness of the Promenade with a
gigolo.

And Mary Hubbell knew this.

Gedeon Gore stood before Mr. and Mrs. Orson J.
Hubbell. "Where is your daughter?" he demanded,
in French.

"Oh, howdy-do," chirped Mrs. Hubbell. "Well,
it's Mr. Gore" ! We missed you. I hope you haven't
been sick."

"Where is your daughter?" demanded Gedeon
Gore, in French. "Where is Mary?"

Mrs. Hubbell caught the word Mary. "Oh, Mary.
Why, she's gone out for a walk with Mr. Mazzetti."

"Good God !" said Gedeon Gore", in perfectly plain
English. And vanished.

Orson J. Hubbell sat a moment, thinking. Then,

104 GIGOLO

"Why, say, he talked English. That young French
fella talked English."

The young French fella, hatless, was skimming
down the Promenade des Anglais, looking intently
ahead, and behind, and to the side, and all around in
the darkness. He seemed to be following a certain
trail, however. At one side of the great wide walk,
facing the ocean, was a canopied bandstand. In its
dim shadow, he discerned a wisp of white. He made
for it, swiftly, silently. Mazzetti's voice low, eager,
insistent. Mazzetti's voice hoarse, ugly, importu-
nate. The figure in white rose. Gore stood before
the two. The girl took a step toward him, but Maz-
zetti took two steps and snarled like a villain in a
movie, if a villain in a movie could be heard to
snarl.

"Get out of here!" said Mazzetti, in French, to
Gore. "You pig ! Swine ! To intrude when I talk with
a lady. You are finished. Now she belongs to me."

"The hell she does !" said Giddy Gory in perfectly
plain American and swung for Mazzetti with his bad
right arm. Mazzetti, after the fashion of his kind,
let fly in most unsportsmanlike fashion with his feet,
kicking at Giddy's stomach and trying to bite with
his small sharp yellow teeth. And then Giddy's
left, that had learned some neat tricks of boxing
in the days of the Gory greatness, landed fairly
on the Mazzetti nose. And with a howl of pain and

GIGOLO 105

rage and terror the Mazzetti, a hand clapped to that
bleeding feature, fled in the darkness.

And, "O, Giddy!" said Mary, "I thought you'd
never come."

"Mary. Mary Hubbell. Did you know all the
time? You did, didn't you? You think I'm a bum,
don't you? Don't you?"

Her hand on his shoulder. "Giddy, I've been stuck
on you since I was nine years old, in Winnebago. I
kept track of you all through the war, though I
never once saw you. Then I lost you. Giddy, when
I was a kid I used to look at you from the sidewalk
through the hedge of the house on Cass. Honestly.
Honestly, Giddy."

"But look at me now. Why, Mary, I'm — I'm
no good. Why, I don't see how you ever knew "

"It takes more than a new Greek nose and French
clothes and a bum arm to fool me, Gid. Do you
know, there were a lot of photographs of you left
up in the attic of the Cass Street house when we
bought it. I know them all by heart, Giddy. By
heart. . . . Come on home, Giddy. Let's go
home,"

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE

AY ONE old enough to read this is old enough
to remember that favourite heroine of fiction
who used to start her day by rising from her
couch, flinging wide her casement, leaning out and
breathing deep the perfumed morning air. You will
recall, too, the pure white rose clambering at the
side of the casement, all jewelled with the dew of
dawn. This the lady plucked carolling. Daily she
plucked it. A hardy perennial if ever there was one.
Subsequently, pressing it to her lips, she flung it
into the garden below, where stood her lover (like-
wise an early riser).

Romantic proceeding this, but unhygienic when
you consider that her rush for the closed casement
was doubtless due to the fact that her bedroom, her-
metically sealed during the night, must have grown
pretty stuffy by morning. Her complexion was
probably bad.

No such idyllic course marked the matin of our
heroine. Her day's beginning differed from the
above in practically every detail. Thus :

A — When Harrietta rose from her couch (cream
106

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 107

enamel, full-sized bed with double hair mattress and
box springs) she closed her casement with a bang,
having slept in a gale that swept her two-room-and-
Icitchenette apartment on the eleventh floor in Fifty-
sixth Street.

B — She never leaned out except, perhaps, to flap
a dust rag, because lean as she might, defying the
laws of gravity and the house superintendent, she
could have viewed nothing more than roofs and sky
and chimneys where already roofs and sky and chim-
neys filled the eye (unless you consider that by
screwing around and flattening one ear and the
side of your jaw against the window jamb you could
almost get a glimpse of distant green prominently
mentioned in the agent's ad as "unexcelled view of
Park").

C — The morning air wasn't perfumed for purposes
of breathing deep, being New York morning air,
richly laden with the smell of warm asphalt, smoke,
gas, and, when the wind was right, the glue factory
on the Jersey shore across the river.

D — She didn't pluck a rose, carolling, because
even if, by some magic Burbankian process, Jack's
bean-stalk had been made rose-bearing it would
have been hard put to it to reach this skyscraper
home.

E — If she had flung it, it probably would have
ended its eleven-story flight in the hand cart of

108 GIGOLO

Messinger's butcher boy, who usually made his first
Fifty-sixth Street delivery at about that time.

F — The white rose would not have been jewelled
and sparkling with the dews of dawn, anyway, as
at Harrietta's rising hour (between 10.30 and 11.30
A. M.) the New York City dews, if any, have left for
the day.

Spartans who rise regularly at the chaste hour of
seven will now regard Harrietta with disapproval.
These should be told that Harrietta never got to
bed before twelve-thirty nor to sleep before two-
thirty, which, on an eight-hour sleep count, should
even things up somewhat in their minds. They must
know, too, that in one corner of her white-and-blue
bathroom reposed a pair of wooden dumb-bells, their
ankles neatly crossed. She used them daily. Also
she bathed, massaged, exercised, took facial and
electric treatments ; worked like a slave ; lived like
an athlete in training in order to preserve her hair,
skin, teeth, and figure; almost never ate what she
wanted nor as much as she liked.

That earlier lady of the closed casement and the
white rose probably never even heard of a denti-
frice or a cold shower.

The result of Harrietta's rigours was that now, at
thirty-seven, she could pass for twenty-seven on
Fifth Avenue at five o'clock (flesh-pink, single-mesh
face veil) ; twenty-five at a small dinner (rose-col-

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 109

cured shades over the candles), and twenty-two,
easily, behind the amber footlights.

You will have guessed that Harrietta, the Hero-
ine, is none other than Harrietta Fuller, deftest of
comediennes, whom you have seen in one or all of
those slim little plays in which she has made a name
but no money to speak of, being handicapped for
the American stage by her intelligence and her
humour sense, and, as she would tell you, by her
very name itself.

"Harrietta Fuller! Don't you see what I mean?"
she would say. "In the first place, it's hard to re-
member. And it lacks force. Or maybe rhythm.
It doesn't clink. It sort of humps in the middle.
A name should flow. Take a name like Barrymore
— or Bernhardt — or Duse — you can't forget them.
Oh, I'm not comparing myself to them. Don't be
funny. I just mean — why, take Harrietta alone.
It's deadly. A Thackeray miss, all black silk mitts
and white cotton stockings. Long ago, in the be-
ginning, I thought of shortening it. But Harriet
Fuller sounds like a school-teacher, doesn't it? And
Hattie Fuller makes me think, somehow, of a bur-
lesque actress. You know. 'Hattie Fuller and Her
Bouncing Belles.' "

At thirty-seven Harrietta Fuller had been fifteen
years on the stage. She had little money, a small
stanch following, an exquisite technique, and her

110 GIGOLO

fur coat was beginning to look gnawed around the
edges. People even said maddeningly: "Harrietta
Fuller? I saw her when I was a kid, years ago.
Why, she must be le'see — ten — twelve — why, she
must be going on pretty close to forty."

A worshipper would defend her. "You're crazy !
I saw her last month when she was playing in Cin-
cinnati, and she doesn't look a day over twenty-one.
That's a cute play she's in — There and Back. Not
much to it, but she's so kind and natural. Made me
think of Jen a little."

That was part of Harrietta's art — making people
think of Jen. Watching her, they would whisper:
"Look! Isn't that Jen all over? The way she
sits there and looks up at him while she's sewing."

Harrietta Fuller could take lines that were stilted
and shoddy and speak them in a way to make them
sound natural and distinctive and real. She was
a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a
contralto note that usually accompanies brunette
colouring.

It surprised and gratified you, that tone, as does
mellow wine when you have expected cider. She
could walk on to one of those stage library sets that
reek of the storehouse and the property carpenter,
seat herself, take up a book or a piece of handiwork,
and instantly the absurd room became a human,
livable place. She had a knack of sitting, not as an

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 111

actress ordinarily seats herself in a drawing room —
feet carefully strained to show the high arch, body
posed to form a "line" — but easily, as a woman sits
in her own house. If you saw her in the supper scene
of My Mistake, you will remember how she twisted
her feet about the rungs of the straight little chair
in which she sat. Her back was toward the audience
throughout the scene, according to stage directions,
yet she managed to convey embarrassment, fright,
terror, determination, decision in the agonized twist-
ing of those expressive feet.

Authors generally claimed these bits of business as
having originated with them. For that matter, she
was a favourite with playwrights, as well she might
be, considering the vitality which she injected into
their hackneyed situations. Every little while some
young writer, fired by an inflection in her voice or
a nuance in her comedy, would rush back stage to
tell her that she never had had a part worthy of her,
and that he would now come to her rescue. Some-
times he kept his word, and Harrietta, six months
later, would look up from the manuscript to say:
"This is delightful ! It's what I've been looking for
for years. The deftness of the comedy. And that
little scene with the gardener!"

But always, after the managers had finished sug-
gesting bits that would brighten it up, and changes
that would put it over with the Western buyers,

112 GIGOLO

Harrietts would regard the mutilated manuscript
sorrowingly. "But I can't play this now, you know.
It isn't the same part at all. It's — forgive me —
vulgar."

Then some little red-haired ingenue would get it,
and it would run a solid year on Broadway and two
seasons on the road, and in all that time Harrietta
would have played six months, perhaps, in three dif-
ferent plays, in all of which she would score what
is known as a "personal success." A personal suc-
cess usually means bad business at the box office.

Now this is immensely significant. In the adver-
tisements of the play in which Harrietta Fuller might
be appearing you never read :

HARRIETTA FULLER
In

Thus and So
No. It was always:

THUS AND SO

With
Harrietta Fuller

Between those two prepositions lies a whole theat~
rical world of difference. The "In" means stardom ;
the "With" that the play is considered more impor-
tant than the cast.

Don't feel sorry for Harrietta Fuller. Thousands

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 113

of women have envied her; thousands of men ad-
mired, and several have loved her devotedly, includ-
ing her father, the Rev. H. John Scoville (deceased).
The H. stands for Harry. She was named for him,
of course. When he entered the church he was
advised to drop his first name and use his second as
being more fitting in his position. But the outward
'change did not affect his inner self. He remained
more Harry than John to the last. It was from him
Harrietta got her acting sense, her humour, her in-
telligence, and her bad luck.

When Harry Scoville was eighteen he wanted to
go on the stage. At twenty he entered the ministry.
It was the natural outlet for his suppressed talents.
In his day and family and environment young men
did not go on the stage. The Scovilles were Illinois
pioneers and lived in Evanston, and Mrs. Scoville
(Harrietta's grandmother, you understand, though
Harrietta had not yet appeared) had a good deal to
say as to whether coleslaw or cucumber pickles
should be served at the Presbyterian church suppers,
along with the veal loaf and the scalloped oysters.
And when she decided on coleslaw, coleslaw it was.
A firm tread had Mother Scoville, a light hand
with pastry, and a will that was adamant. She it
was who misdirected Harry's gifts toward the pulpit
instead of the stage. He never forgave her for it,
though he made a great success of his calling and she

114 GIGOLO

died unsuspecting his rancour. The women of his
congregation shivered deliciously when the Rev. H.
John Scoville stood on his tiptoes at the apex of
some fiery period and hurled the force of his elo-
quence at them. He, the minister, was unconsciously
dramatizing himself as a minister.

The dramatic method had not then come into use
in the pulpit. His method of delivery was more
restrained than that of the old-time revivalist; less
analytical and detached than that of the present-day
religious lecturer.

Presbyterian Evanston wending its way home to
Sunday roast and ice cream would say: "Wasn't
Reverend Scoville powerful to-day! My!" They
never guessed how Reverend Scoville had had to
restrain himself from delivering Mark Antony's ad-
dress to the Romans. He often did it in his study
when his gentle wife thought he was rehearsing next
Sunday's sermon.

As he grew older he overcame these boyish weak-
nesses, but he never got over his feeling for the stage.
There were certain ill-natured gossips who claimed
to have recognized the fine, upright figure and the
mobile face with hair greying at the temples as
having occupied a seat in the third row of the bal-
cony in the old Grand Opera House during the run
of Erminie. The elders put it down as spite talk
and declared that, personally, they didn't believe

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 115

a word of it. The Rev. H. John did rather startle
them when he discarded the ministerial black
broadcloth for a natty Oxford suit of almost busi-
ness cut. He was a pioneer in this among the clergy.
The congregation soon became accustomed to it ; in
time, boasted of it as marking their progressiveness.

He had a neat ankle, had the Reverend Scoville,
in fine black lisle ; a merry eye ; a rather grim look
about the mouth, as has a man whose life is a secret
disappointment. His little daughter worshipped
him. He called her Harry. When Harrietta was
eleven she was reading Lever and Dickens and Dumas,
while other little girls were absorbed in the Elsie
Series and The Wide, Wide World. Her father
used to deliver his sermons to her in private re-
hearsal, and her eager mobile face reflected his every
written mood.

"Oh, Rev !" she cried one day (it is to be regretted,
but that is what she always called him). "Oh, Rev,
you should have been an actor !"

He looked at her queerly. "What makes you
think so?"

"You're too thrilling for a minister." She
searched about in her agile mind for fuller means of
making her thought clear. "It's like when Mother
cooks rose geranium leaves in her grape jell. She
says they gives it a finer flavour, but they don't
really. You can't taste them for the grapes, so

116 GIGOLO

they're just wasted when they're so darling and per-
fumy and just right in the garden." Her face was
pink with earnestness.

"D'you see what I mean, Rev?"

"Yes, I think I see, Harry."

Then she surprised him. "I'm going on the stage,"
she said, "and be a great actress when I'm grown
up."

His heart gave a leap and a lurch. "Why do
you say that?"

"Because I want to. And because you didn't.
It'll be as if you had been an actor instead of a min-
ister— only it'll be me."

A bewildering enough statement to any one but
the one who made it and the one to whom it was
made. She was trying to say that here was the law
of compensation working. But she didn't know this.
She had never heard of the law of compensation.

Her gentle mother fought her decision with all the
savagery of the gentle.

"You'll have to run away, Harry," her father
said, sadly. And at twenty-two Harrietta ran.
Her objective was New York. Her father did not
burden her with advice. He credited her with the
intelligence she possessed, but he did overlook her
emotionalism, which was where he made his mistake.
Just before she left he said: "Now listen, Harry.
You're a good-looking girl, and young. You'll keep

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 117

your looks for a long time. You're not the kind
of blonde who'll get wishy-washy or fat. You've got
quite a good deal of brunette in you. It crops out
in your voice. It'll help preserve your looks. Don't
marry the first man who asks you or the first man
who says he'll die if you don't. You've got lots of
time."

That kind of advice is a good thing for the young.
Two weeks later Harrietta married a man she had
met on the train between Evanston and New York.
His name was Lawrence Fuller, and Harrietta had
gone to school with him in Evanston. She had lost
track of him later. She remembered, vaguely, peo-
ple had said he had gone to New York and was
pretty wild. Young as she was and inexperienced,
there still was something about his face that warned
her. It was pathological, but she knew nothing
of pathology. He talked of her and looked at her
and spoke, masterfully and yet shyly, of being with
her in New York. Harrietta loved the way his hair
sprang away from his brow and temples in a clean
line. She shoved the thought of his chin out of her
mind. His hands touched her a good deal — her
shoulder, her knee, her wrist — but so lightly that
she couldn't resent it even if she had wanted to.
When they did this, queer little stinging flashes
darted through her veins. He said he would die
if she did not marry him.

118 GIGOLO

They had two frightful years together and eight
years apart before he died, horribly, in the sana-
torium whose enormous fees she paid weekly.
They had regularly swallowed her earnings at a gulp.

Naturally a life like this develops the comedy
sense. You can't play tragedy while you're liv-
ing it. Harrietta served her probation in stock,
road companies, one-night stands before she achieved
Broadway. In five years her deft comedy method
had become distinctive; in ten it was unique. Yet
success — as the stage measures it in size of follow-
ing and dollars of salary — had never been hers.

Harrietta knew she wasn't a success. She saw
actresses younger, older, less adroit, lacking her
charm, minus her beauty, featured, starred, heralded.
Perhaps she gave her audiences credit for more in-
telligence than they possessed, and they, uncon-
sciously, resented this. Perhaps if she had read the
Elsie Series at eleven, instead of Dickens, she might
have been willing to play in that million-dollar suc-
cess called Gossip. It was offered her. The lead
was one of those saccharine parts, vulgar, false, and
slyly carnal. She didn't in the least object to it
on the ground of immorality, but the bad writing
bothered her. There was, for example, a line in
which she was supposed to beat her breast and
say: "He's my mate! He's my man! And I'm his
woman!! I love him, I tell you I — love him!"

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 119

"People don't talk like that," she told the author,
in a quiet aside, during rehearsal. "Especially
women. They couldn't. They use quite common*
place idiom when they're excited."

"Thanks," said the author, elaborately polite.
"That's the big scene in the play. It'll be a knock-
out."

When Harrietta tried to speak these lines in re-
hearsal she began to giggle and ended in throwing up
the ridiculous part. They gave it to that little
Frankie Langdon, and the playwright's prophecy
came true. The breast-beating scene was a knock-
out. It ran for two years in New York alone. Lang-
don's sables, chinchillas, ermines, and jewels were
always sticking out from the pages of Vanity Fair
and Vogue. When she took curtain calls, Lang-
don stood with her legs far apart, boyishly, and
tossed her head and looked up from beneath her
lowered lids and acted surprised and sort of gasped
like a fish and bit her lip and mumbled to herself
as if overcome. The audience said wasn't she a shy,
young, bewildered darling!

A hard little rip if ever there was one — Langdon
— and as shy as a man-eating crocodile.

This sort of sham made Harrietta sick. She,
whose very art was that of pretending, hated pre-
tense, affectation, "coy stuff." This was, perhaps,
unfortunate. Your Fatigued Financier prefers

120 GIGOLO

the comedy form in which a spade is not only called
a spade but a slab of iron for digging up dirt.
Harrietta never even pretended to have a cough on
an opening night so that the critics, should the play
prove a failure, might say: "Harrietta Fuller,
though handicapped by a severe cold, still gave her
usual brilliant and finished performance in a part
not quite worthy of her talents." No. The
plaintive smothered cough, the quick turn aside,
the heaving shoulder, the wispy handkerchief were
clumsy tools beneath her notice.

There often were long periods of idleness when
her soul sickened and her purse grew lean. Long
hot summers in New York when awnings, window
boxes geranium filled, drinks iced and acidulous, and
Ken's motor car for cooling drives to the beaches
failed to soothe the terror in her. Thirty .
thirty-two . . . thirty-four . . . thirty-
six. . . .

She refused to say it. She refused to think of it.
She put the number out of her mind and slammed the
door on it — on that hideous number beginning with
f. At such times she was given to contemplation of
her own photographs — and was reassured. Her in-
telligence told her that retouching varnish, pumice
stone, hard pencil, and etching knife had all gone
into the photographer's version of this clear-eyed,
fresh-lipped blooming creature gazing back at her so

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 121

Jimpidly. But, then, who didn't need a lot of re-
touching? Even the youngest of them.

All this. Yet she loved it. The very routine of
it appealed to her orderly nature: a routine that,
were it widely known, would shatter all those ideas
about the large, loose life of the actress. Harrietta
Fuller liked to know that at such and such an hour
she would be in her dressing room ; at such and such
an hour on the stage; precisely at another hour she
would again be in her dressing room preparing to
go home. Then the stage would be darkened. They
would be putting the scenery away. She would be
crossing the bare stage on her way home. Then she
would be home, undressing, getting ready for bed,
reading. She liked a cup of clear broth at night,
or a drink of hot cocoa. It soothed and rested her.
Besides, one is hungry after two and a half hours of
high-tensioned, nerve-exhausting work. She was in
bed usually by twelve-thirty.

"But you can't fall asleep like a dewy babe in
my kind of job," she used to explain. "People
wonder why actresses lie in bed until noon, or nearly.
They have to, to get as much sleep as a stenographer
or a clerk or a bookkeeper. At midnight I'm all
keyed up and over-stimulated, and as wide awake
as an all-night taxi driver. It takes two solid hours
of reading to send me bye-bye."

The world did not interest itself in that phase of

122 GIGOLO

Harrietta's life. Neither did it find fascination in
her domestic side. Harrietta did a good deal of
tidying and dusting and redding up in her own two-
room apartment, so high and bright and spotless.
She liked to cook, too, and was expert at it. Not
for her those fake pictures of actresses and opera
stars in chiffon tea gowns and satin slippers and
diamond chains cooking "their favourite dish of
spaghetti and creamed mushrooms," and staring
out at you bright-eyed and palpably unable to tell
the difference between salt and paprika. Harrietta
liked the ticking of a clock in a quiet room; oven
smells ; concocting new egg dishes ; washing out
lacy things in warm soapsuds. A throw-back, prob-
ably, to her grandmother Scoville.

The worst feature of a person like Harrietta is,
as you already have discovered with some impatience,
that one goes on and on, talking about her. And
the listener at last breaks out with : "This is all very
interesting, but I feel as if I know her now. What
then?"

Then the thing to do is to go serenely on telling,
for example, how the young thing in Harrietta
Fuller's company invariably came up to her at the
first rehearsal and said tremulously: "Miss Fuller,
I — you won't mind — I just want to tell you how
proud I am to be one of your company. Playing
with you. You've been my ideal ever since I was

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 123

a little g — " then, warned by a certain icy mask slip-
ping slowly over the brightness of Harrietta's fea-
tures— "ever so long, but I never even hoped "

These young things always learned an amazing
lot from watching the deft, sure strokes of Harri-
etta's craftsmanship. She was kind to them, too.
Encouraged them. Never hogged a scene that be-
longed to them. Never cut their lines. Never
patronized them. They usually played ingenue
parts, and their big line was that uttered on
coming into a room looking for Harrietta. It was:
"Ah, there you are!"

How can you really know Harrietta unless you
realize the deference with which she was treated in
her own little sphere? If the world at large did not
acclaim her, there was no lack of appreciation on the
part of her fellow workers. They knew artistry when
they saw it. Though she had never attained star-
dom, she still had the distinction that usually comes
only to a star back stage. Unless she actually was
playing in support of a first-magnitude star, her
dressing room was marked "A." Other members
of the company did not drop into her dressing room
except by invitation. That room was neat to the
point of primness. A square of white coarse sheet-
ing was spread on the floor, under the chair before
her dressing table, to gather up dust and powder.
It was regularly shaken or changed. There were

124 GIGOLO

always flowers — often a single fine rose in a slender
vase. On her dressing table, in a corner, you were
likely to find three or four volumes — perhaps The
Amenities of Book-Collecting; something or other
of Max Beerbohm's ; a book of verse (not Amy
Lowell's).

These were not props designed to impress the
dramatic critic who might drop in for one of those
personal little theatrical calls to be used in next
Sunday's "Chats in the Wings." They were there
because Harrietta liked them and read them between
acts. She had a pretty wit of her own. The
critics liked to talk with her. Even George Jean
Hathem, whose favourite pastime was to mangle
the American stage with his pen and hold its bleed-
ing, gaping fragments up for the edification of
Budapest, Petrograd, Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris,
and Stevens Point, Wis., said that five minutes of
Harrietta Fuller's conversation was worth a life-time
of New York stage dialogue. For that matter
I think that Mr. Beerbohm himself would not have
found a talk with her altogether dull or profitless.

The leading man generally made love to her in an
expert, unaggressive way. A good many men had
tried to make love to her at one time or another.
They didn't get on very well. Harrietta never went
to late suppers. Some of them complained : "When
you try to make love to her she laughs at you !" She

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 125

wasn't really laughing at them. She was laughing
at what she knew about life. Occasionally men now
married, and living dully content in the prim sub-
urban smugness of Pelham or New Rochelle, boasted
of past friendship with her, wagging their heads
doggishly. "Little Fuller ! I used to know her well."

They lied.

Not that she didn't count among her friends many
men. She dined with them and they with her.
They were writers and critics, lawyers and doc-
tors, engineers and painters. Actors almost never.
They sent her books and flowers ; valued her opinion,
delighted in her conversation, wished she wouldn't
sometimes look at them so quizzically. And if they
didn't always comprehend her wit, they never failed
to appreciate the contour of her face, where the
thoughtful brow was contradicted by the lovely
little nose, and both were drowned in the twin wells
of the wide-apart, misleadingly limpid eyes that lay
ensnaringly between.

"Your eyes!" these gentlemen sometimes stam-
mered, "the lashes are reflected in them like ferns
edging a pool."

"Yes. The mascaro's good for them. You'd
think all that black sticky stuff I have put on, would
hurt them, but it really makes them grow, I believe.
Sometimes I even use a burnt match, and yet
it "

126 GIGOLO

"Damn your burnt matches! I'm talking about
your lashes."

"So am I." She would open her eyes wide in
surprise, and the lashes could almost be said to wave
at him tantalizingly, like fairy fans. (He probably
wished he could have thought of that.)

Ken never talked to her about her lashes. Ken
thought she was the most beauteous, witty, intelligent
woman in the world, but he had never told her so,
and she found herself wishing he would. Ken was
forty-one and Knew About Etchings. He knew
about a lot of other things, too. Difficult, complex
things like Harrietta Fuller, for example. He had
to do with some intricate machine or other that was
vital to printing, and he was perfecting something
connected with it or connecting something needed
for its perfection that would revolutionize the thing
the machine now did (whatever it was). Harrietta
refused to call him an inventor. She said it sounded
so impecunious. They had known each other for
six years. When she didn't feel like talking he
didn't say: "What's the matter?" He never told
her that women had no business monkeying with
stocks or asked her what they called that stuff her
dress was made of, or telephoned before noon.
Twice a year he asked her to marry him, presenting
excellent reasons. His name was Carrigan. You'd
like him.

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 127

"When I marry," Harrietts Would announce,
"which will be never, it will be the only son of a rich
iron king from Duluth, Minnesota. And I'll go there
to live in an eighteen-room mansion and pluck roses
for the breakfast room."

"There are few roses in Duluth," said "Ken, "to
speak of. And no breakfast rooms. You break-
fast in the dining room, and in the winter you wear
flannel underwear and galoshes."

"California, then. And he can be the son of a
fruit king. I'm not narrow."

Harrietta was thirty-seven and a half when there
came upon her a great fear. It had been a wretch-
edly bad season. Two failures. The rent on her
two-room apartment in Fifty-sixth Street jumped
from one hundred and twenty-five, which she could
afford, to two hundred a month, which she couldn't.
Mary — Irish Mary — her personal maid, left her
in January. Personal maids are one of the super-
stitions of the theatrical profession, and an actress
of standing is supposed to go hungry rather than
maidless.

"Why don't you fire Irish Mary?" Ken had
asked Harriettta during a period of stringency.

"I can't afford to."

Ken understood, but you may not. Harrietta
would have made it clear. "Any actress who earns
more than a hundred a week is supposed to have a

128 GIGOLO

maid in her dressing room. No one knows why,
but it's true. I remember in The Small-Town
Girl I wore the same gingham dress throughout
three acts, but I was paying Mary twenty a week
just the same. If I hadn't some one in the company
would have told some one in another company that
Harrietta Fuller was broke. It would have seeped
through the director to the manager, and next time
they offered me a part they'd cut my salary. It's
absurd, but there it is. A vicious circle."

Irish Mary's reason for leaving Harrietta was
a good one. It would have to be, for she was of
that almost extinct species, the devoted retainer.
Irish Mary wasn't the kind of maid one usually
encounters back stage. No dapper, slim, black-
and-white pert miss, with a wisp of apron and a
knowledgeous eye. An ample, big-hipped, broad-
bosomed woman with an apron like a drop curtain
and a needle knack that kept Harrietta mended, be-
ribboned, beruffled, and exquisite from her garters
to her coat hangers. She had been around the thea-
tre for twenty-five years, and her thick, deft fingers
had served a long line of illustrious ladies — Corinne
Foster, Gertrude Bennett, Lucille Varney. She
knew all the shades of grease paint from Flesh to
Sallow Old Age, and if you gained an ounce she
warned you.

Her last name was Lesom, but nobody re-

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 129

membered it until she brought forward a daughter
of fifteen with the request that she be given a job;
anything — walk-on, extra, chorus. Lyddy, she
called her. The girl seldom spoke. She was ex-
tremely stupid, but a marvellous mimic, and pretty
beyond belief; fragile, and yet with something com-
mon about her even in her fragility. Her wrists had
a certain flat angularity that bespoke a peasant an-
cestry, but she had a singular freshness and youthful
bloom. The line of her side face from the eye socket
to the chin was a delicious thing that curved with the
grace of a wing. The high cheekbone sloped down
so that the outline was heart-shaped. There were
little indentations at the corners of her mouth.
She had eyes singularly clear, like a child's, and a
voice so nasal, so strident, so dreadful that when
she parted her pretty lips and spoke, the sound
shocked you like a peacock's raucous screech.

Harrietta had managed to get a bit for her here,
a bit for her there, until by the time she was eight-
een she was giving a fairly creditable performance
in practically speechless parts. It was dangerous
to trust her even with an "Ah, there you are !" line.
The audience, startled, was so likely to laugh.

At about this point she vanished, bound for Holly-
wood and the movies. "She's the little fool, just,"
said Irish Mary. "What'll she be wantin' with the
movies, then, an' her mother connected with the

130 GIGOLO

theayter for years an* all, and her you might say
brought up in it?"

But she hadn't been out there a year before the
world knew her as Lydia Lissome. Starting as an
extra girl earning twenty-five a week or less, she
had managed, somehow, to get the part of Betty
in the screen version of The Magician, probably
because she struck the director as being the type;
or perhaps her gift of mimicry had something to do
with it, and the youth glow that was in her face.
At any rate, when the picture was finished and
released, no one was more surprised than Lyddy
at the result. They offered her three thousand a
week on a three-year contract. She wired her
mother, but Irish Mary wired back : "I don't believe
a word of it hold out for five am coming." She left
for the Coast. Incidentally, she got the five for
Lyddy. Lyddy signed her name to the contract —
Lydia Lissome — in a hand that would have done
discredit to an eleven-year-old.

Harrietta told Ken about it, not without some
bitterness: "Which only proves one can't be too
careful about picking one's parents. If my father
had been a hod carrier instead of a minister of the
Gospel and a darling old dreamer, I'd be earning
five thousand a week, too."

They were dining together in Harrietta's little
sitting room so high up and quiet and bright with its

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 131

cream enamel and its log fire. Almost one entire
wall of that room was window, facing south, and
framing such an Arabian Nights panorama as
only a New York eleventh-story window, facing
south, can offer.

Ken lifted his right eyebrow, which was a way he
had when being quizzical. "What would you do
with five thousand a week, just supposing?"

"I'd do all the vulgar things that other people
do who have five thousand a week."

"You wouldn't enjoy them. You don't care for
small dogs or paradise aigrettes or Italian villas in
Connecticut or diamond-studded cigarette holders
or plush limousines or butlers." He glanced com-
prehensively about the little room — at the baby
grand whose top was pleasantly littered with photo-
graphs and bonbon dishes and flower vases; at the
smart little fire snapping in the grate; at the cheer-
ful reds and blues and ochres and sombre blues and
purples and greens of the books in the open book-
shelves ; at the squat clock on the mantelshelf ; at the
gorgeous splashes of black and gold glimpsed
through the many-paned window. "You've got
everything you really want right here" — his gesture
seemed, somehow, to include himself — "if you only
knew it."

"You talk," snapped Harrietta, "as the Rev. H.
John Scoville used to." She had never said a thing

132 GIGOLO

like that before. "I'm sick of what they call being
true to my art. I'm tired of having last year's
suit relined, even if it is smart enough to be good this
year. I'm sick of having the critics call me an in-
telligent comedienne who is unfortunate in her choice
of plays. Some day" — a little flash of fright was
there — "I'll pick up the Times and see myself re-
ferred to as 'that sterling actress.' Then I'll know
I'm through."

"You !"

"Tell me I'm young, Ken. Tell me I'm young and
beautiful and bewitching."

"You're young and beautiful and bewitching."

"Ugh! And yet they say the Irish have the
golden tongues."

Two months later Harrietta had an offer to go
into pictures. It wasn't her first, but it undeniably
was the best. The sum offered per week was what
she might usually expect to get per month in a suc-
cessful stage play. To accept the offer meant the
Coast. She found herself having a test picture
taken and trying to believe the director who said
it was good ; found herself expatiating on the bright-
ness, quietness, and general desirability of the
eleventh-floor apartment in Fifty-sixth Street to
an acquaintance who was seeking a six months' city
haven for the summer.

"Shell probably ruin my enamel dressing table

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 133

with toilet water and ring my piano top with wet
glasses and spatter grease on the kitchenette wall.
But I'll be earning a million," Harrietta announced,
recklessly, "or thereabouts. Why should I care?"

She did care, though, as a naturally neat and
thrifty woman cares for her household goods which
have, through years of care of them and associa-
tion with them, become her household gods. The
clock on the mantel wasn't a clock, but a plump
friend with a white smiling face and a soothing
tongue; the low, ample davenport wasn't a daven-
port only, but a soft bosom that pillowed her ; that
which lay spread shimmering beneath her window
was not New York alone — it was her View. To a
woman like this, letting her apartment furnished is
like farming out her child to strangers.

She had told her lessee about her laundress and
her cleaning woman and how to handle the balky
faucet that controlled the shower. She had said
good-bye to Ken entirely surrounded by his books,
magazines, fruit, and flowers. She was occupying
a Pullman drawing room paid for by the free-handed
filmers. She was crossing farm lands, plains,
desert. She was wondering if all those pink sweaters
and white flannel trousers outside the Hollywood
Hotel were there for the same reason that she
was. She was surveying a rather warm little room
shaded by a dense tree whose name she did not know.

134 GIGOLO

She was thinking it felt a lot like her old trouping
days, when her telephone tinkled and a voice an-
nounced Mrs. Lissome. Lissome? Lesam. Irish
Mary, of course. Harrietta's maid, engaged for
the trip, had failed her at the last moment. Now
her glance rested on the two massive trunks and
the litter of smart, glittering bags that strewed
the room. A relieved look crept into her eyes. A
knock at the door. A resplendent figure was re-
vealed at its opening. The look in Harrietta's
eyes vanished.

Irish Mary looked like the mother of a girl who
was earning five thousand a week. She was marcel-
led, silk-clad, rustling, gold-meshed, and, oh, how
real in spite of it all as she beamed upon the dazzled
Harrietta.

"Out with ye!" trumpeted this figure, brushing
aside Harrietta's proffered chair. "There'll be no
stayin' here for you. You're coming along with me,
then, bag and baggage." She glanced sharply
about. "Where's your maid, dearie?"

"Disappointed me at the last minute. I'll have
to get someone "

"We've plenty. You're coming up to our place."

"But, Mary, I can't. I couldn't. I'm tired.
This room "

"A hole. Wait till you see The Place. Gardens
and breakfast rooms and statues and fountains and

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 135

them Jap boys runnin' up and down like mice. We
rented it for a year from that Goya Giro. She's
gone back East. How she ever made good in pic-
tures I don't know, and her face like a hot-water
bag for expression. Lyddy's going to build next
year. They're drawin* up the plans now. The
Place '11 be nothin' compared to it when it's finished.
Put on your hat. The boys'll see to your stuff here."

"I can't. I couldn't. You're awfully kind, Mary
dear "

Mary dear was at the telephone. "Mrs. Lissome.
That's who. Send up that Jap boy for the bags."

Mrs. Lissome's name and Mrs. Lissome's com-
mands apparently carried heavily in Hollywood. A
uniformed Jap appeared immediately as though
summoned by a genie. The bags seemed to spring
to him, so quickly was he enveloped by their glitter-
ing surfaces. He was off with the burdens, invisible
except for his gnomelike face and his sturdy bow
legs in their footman's boots.

"I can't," said Harrietta, feebly, for the last time.
It was her introduction to the topsy-turvy world
into which she had come. She felt herself propelled
down the stairs by Irish Mary, who wasn't Irish
Mary any more, but a Force whose orders were
obeyed. In the curved drive outside the Hollywood
Hotel the little Jap was stowing the last of the bags
into the great blue car whose length from nose to

136 GIGOLO

tail seemed to span the hotel frontage. At the wheel,
rigid, sat a replica of the footman.

Irish Mary with a Japanese chauffeur. Irish
Mary with a Japanese footman. Irish Mary with a
great glittering car that was as commodious as the
average theatre dressing room.

"Get in, dearie. Lyddy's using the big car to-
day. They're out on location. Shootin' the last
of Devils and Men.

Harrietta was saying to herself: "Don't be a
nasty snob, Harry. This is a different world.
Think of the rotten time Alice would have had in
Wonderland if she hadn't been broad-minded. Take
it as it comes."

Irish Mary was talking as they sped along through
the hot white Hollywood sunshine. . . . "Stay
right with us as long as you like, dearie, but if
after you're workin' you want a place of your own,
I know of just the thing you can rent furnished, and
a Jap gardener and house man and cook right on
the places besides "

"But I'm not signed for five thousand a week, like
Lydia," put in Harrietta.

"I know what you're signed for. 'Twas me put
'em up to it, an' who else! 'Easy money,' I says,
'an' why shouldn't she be gettin' some of it ?' Lyddy
spoke to Gans about it. What Lyddy says goes.
She's a good girl, Lyddy is, an' would you believe

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 137

the money an' all hasn't gone to her brains, though
what with workin' like a horse an' me to steady her,
an' shrewder than the lawyers themself, if I do say
it, she ain't had much chance. And here's The
Place."

And here was The Place. Sundials, rose gardens,
gravel paths, dwarf trees, giant trees, fountains,
swimming pools, tennis courts, goldfish, statues,
verandas, sleeping porches, awnings, bird baths,
pergolas.

Inside more Japs. Maids. Rooms furnished
like the interior of movie sets that Harrietta re-
membered having seen. A bedroom, sitting room,
dressing room, and bath all her own in one wing of
the great white palace, only one of thousands of
great white palaces scattered through the hills of
Hollywood. The closet for dresses, silk-lined and
scented, could have swallowed whole her New York
bedroom.

"Lay down," said Irish Mary, "an* get easy.
Lyddy won't be home till six if she's early, an' she'll
prob'bly be in bed by nine now they're rushin' the
end of the picture, an' she's got to be on the lot made
up by nine or sooner."

"Nine — in the morning !"

"Well, sure! You soon get used to it. They've
got to get all the daylight they can, an' times the
fog's low earlier, or they'd likely start at seven or

138 GIGOLO

eight. You look a little beat, dearie. Lay down.
I'll have you unpacked while we're eatin'."

But Harrietta did not lie down. She went to
the window. Below a small army of pigmy garden-
ers were doing expert things to flower beds and
bushes that already seemed almost shamelessly
prolific. Harrietta thought, suddenly, of her green-
painted flower boxes outside the eleventh-story south
window in the New York flat. Outside her window
here a great scarlet hibiscus stuck its tongue out at
her. Harrietta stuck her tongue out at it, child-
ishly, and turned away. She liked a certain reti-
cence in flowers, as in everything else. She sat down
at the desk, took up a sheet of lavender and gold
paper and the great lavender plumed pen. The
note she wrote to Ken was the kind of note that only
Ken would understand, unless you've got into the
way of reading it once a year or so, too :

Ken, dear, I almost wish I hadn't gone down that
rabbit hole, and yet — and yet — it's rather curious, you
know, this sort of life.

Two weeks later, when she had begun to get used
to her new work, her new life, the strange hours,
people, jargon, she wrote him another cryptic note:

Alice — "Well, in our country you'd generally get to
somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time,
as I've been doing."

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 139

Red Queen — "Here it takes all the running you can
do to keep in the same place."

In those two weeks things had happened rather
breathlessly. Harrietta had moved from the splen-
dours of The Place to her own rose-embowered
bungalow. Here, had she wanted to do any case-
ment work with a white rose, like that earlier heroine,
she could easily have managed it had not the early
morning been so feverishly occupied in reaching the
lot in time to be made up by nine. She soon learned
the jargon. "The lot" meant the studio in which
she was working, and its environs. "We're going to
shoot you this morning," meant that she would be
needed in to-day's scenes. Often she was in bed by
eight at night, so tired that she could not sleep.
She wondered \*hat the picture was about. She
couldn't make head or tail of it.

They were filming J. N. Gardner's novel, Ro-
mance of Arcady, but they had renamed it Let's
Get a Husband. The heroine in the novel was the
young wife of twenty-seven who had been married
five years. This was Harrietta's part. In the book
there had been a young girl, too — a saccharine miss
of seventeen who was the minor love interest. This
was Lydia Lissome's part. Slowly it dawned on
Harrietta that things had been nightmarishly tam-
pered with in the film version, and that the change in

140 GIGOLO

name was the least of the indignities to which the
novel had been subjected.

It took Harrietta some time to realize this be-
cause they were not taking the book scenes in their
sequence. They took them according to light, con-
venience, location. Indoor scenes were taken in
one group, so that the end of the story might often
be the first to be filmed.

For a week Harrietta was dressed, made up, and
ready for work at nine o'clock, and for a week she
wasn't used in a single scene. The hours of waiting
made her frantic. The sun was white hot. Her
little dressing room was stifling. She hated her
face with its dead-white mask and blue-lidded eyes.
When, finally, her time came she found that after
being dressed and ready from nine until five-thirty
daily she was required, at 4 :56 on the sixth day, to
cross the set, open a door, stop, turn, appear to be
listening, and recross the set to meet someone en-
tering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial
as it appeared, was rehearsed seven times before the
director was satisfied with it.

The person for whom she had paused, turned,
and crossed was Lydia Lissome. And Lydia Lis-
some, it soon became evident, had the lead in this
film. In the process of changing from novel to
scenario, the Young Wife had become a rather
middle-aged wife, and the Flapper of seventeen had

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 141

become the heroine. And Harrietts Fuller, erst-
while actress of youthful comedy parts for the stage,
found herself moving about in black velvet and
pearls and a large plumed fan as a background for
the white ruffles and golden curls and sunny scenes
in which Lydia Lissome held the camera's eye.

For years Harrietta Fuller's entrance during a
rehearsal always had created a little stir among the
company. This one rose to give her a seat; that
one made her a compliment ; Sam Klein, the veteran
director, patted her cheek and said: "You're going
to like this part, Miss Fuller. And they're going to
eat it up. You see." The author bent over her in
mingled nervousness and deference and admiration.
The Young Thing who was to play the ingenue part
said shyly: "Oh, Miss Fuller, may I tell you how
happy I am to be playing with you? You've been
my ideal, etc."

And now Harrietta Fuller, in black velvet, was
the least important person on the lot. No one was
rude to her. Everyone was most kind, in fact.
Kind! To Harrietta Fuller! She found that her
face felt stiff and expressionless after long hours of
waiting, waiting, and an elderly woman who was
playing a minor part showed her how to overcome
this by stretching her face, feature for feature, as
a dancer goes through limbering exercises in the
wings. The woman had been a trouper in the old

142 GIGOLO

days of one-night stands. Just before she stepped
in front of the camera you saw her drawing down
her face grotesquely, stretching her mouth to form
an oval, dropping her jaw, twisting her lips to the
right, to the left, rolling her eyes round and round.
It was a perfect lesson in facial calisthenics, and
Harrietta was thankful for it. Harrietta was in-
terested in such things — interested in them, and
grateful for what they taught her.

She told herself that she didn't mind the stir that
Lydia Lissome made when she was driven up in the
morning in her great blue limousine with the two
Japs sitting so straight and immobile in front, like
twin Nipponese gods. But she did. She told her-
self she didn't mind when the director said: "Miss
Fuller, if you'll just watch Miss Lissome work. She
has perfect picture tempo." But she did. The
director was the new-fashioned kind, who spoke
softly, rehearsed you almost privately, never bawled
through a megaphone. A slim young man in a
white shirt and flannel trousers and a pair of Har-
vard-looking glasses. Everybody was young. That
was it! Not thirty, or thirty-two, or thirty-four,
or thirty-seven, but young. Terribly, horribly,
actually young. That was it.

Harrietta Fuller was too honest not to face this
fact squarely. When she went to a Thursday-night
dance at the Hollywood Hotel she found herself in

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 143

a ballroom full of slim, pliant, corsetless young
things of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The men, with
marcelled hair and slim feet and sunburnt faces,
were mere boys. As juveniles on the stage they
might have been earning seventy-five or one hundred
or one hundred and fifty dollars a week. Here they
owned estates, motor cars in fleets, power boats ; had
secretaries, valets, trainers. Their technique was
perfect and simple. They knew their work. When
they kissed a girl, or entered a room, or gazed after
a woman, or killed a man in. the presence of a woman
(while working) they took off their hats. Turned
slowly, and took off their hats. They were man-
nerly, too, outside working hours. They treated
Harrietta with boyish politeness — when they noticed
her at all.

"Oh, won't you have this chair, Miss Fuller? I
didn't notice you were standing."

They didn't notice she was standing !

"What are you doing, Miss — ah — Fuller? Yes,

you did say Fuller. Names Are you doing a

dowager bit?"

"Dowager bit?"

"I see. You're new to the game, aren't you? I
saw you working to-day. We always speak of these
black-velvet parts as dowager bits. Just excuse

me. I see a friend of mine " The friend of

mine would be a willow wand with golden curls, and

144 GIGOLO

what Harrietta rather waspishly called a Gunga
Din costume. She referred to that Kipling descrip-
tion in which:

The uniform 'e wore

Was nothin' much before,

An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.

"They're wearing them that way here in Holly-
wood," she wrote Ken. She wrote Ken a good many
things. But there were, too, a good many things
she did not write him.

At the end of the week she would look at her
check — and take small comfort. "You've got
everything you really want right here," Ken had
said, "if you only knew it."

If only she had known it.

Well, she knew it now. Now, frightened, bewil-
dered, resentful. Thirty-seven. Why, thirty-seven
was old in Hollywood. Not middle-aged, or getting
on, or well preserved, but old. Even Lydia Lissome,
at twenty, always made them put one thickness of
chiffon over the camera's lens before she would let
them take the close-ups. Harrietta thought of that
camera now as a cruel Cyclops from whose hungry
eye nothing escaped — wrinkles, crow's-feet — noth-
ing.

They had been working two months on the picture.
It was almost finished. Midsummer. Harrietta's

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 145

little bungalow garden was ablaze with roses,
dahlias, poppies, asters, strange voluptuous flowers
whose names she did not know. The roses, plucked
and placed in water, fell apart, petal by petal, two
hours afterward. From her veranda she saw the
Sierra Madre range and the foothills. She thought
of her "unexcelled view of Park" which could be had
by flattening one ear and the side of your face
against the window jamb.

The sun came up, hard and bright and white, day
after day. Hard and white and hot and dry. "Like
a woman," Harrietta thought, "who wears a red
satin gown all the time. You'd wish she'd put on
gingham just once, for a change." She told her-
self that she was parched for a walk up Riverside
Drive in a misty summer rain, the water sloshing in
her shoes.

"Happy, my ducky?" Irish Mary would say,
beaming upon her.

"Perfectly," from Harrietta.

"It's time, too. Real money you're pullin' down
here. And a paradise if ever there was one."

"I notice, though, that as soon as they've com-
pleted a picture they take the Overland back to New
York and make dates with each other for lunch at
the Claridge, like matinee girls."

Irish Mary flapped a negligent palm. "Ah, well,
change is what we all want, now and then." She

146 GIGOLO

looked at Harrietta sharply. "You're not wantin'
to go back, are ye?"

"N-no," faltered Harrietta. Then, brazenly,
hotly : "Yes, yes !" ending, miserably, with : "But my
contract. Six months."

"You can break it, if you're fool enough, when
they've finished this picture, though why you should

want to " Irish Mary looked as belligerent as

her kindly Celtic face could manage.

But it was not until the last week of the
filming of Let's get a Husband that Harri-
etta came to her and said passionately: "I do!
I do!"

"Do what?" Irish Mary asked, blankly.

"Do want to break my contract. You said I
could after this picture."

"Sure you can. They hired you because I put
Lyddy up to askin' them to. I'd thought you'd
be pleased for the big money an' all. There's no
pleasin' some."

"It isn't that. You don't understand. To-
day "

"Well, what's happened to-day that's so turrible,
then?"

But how could Harrietta tell her? "Today "

she began again, faltered, stopped. To-day, you
must know, this had happened : It was the Big Scene
of the film. Lydia Lissome, in black lace night-

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 147

gown and ermine negligee, her hair in marcel waves,
had just been "shot" for it.

"Now then, Miss Fuller," said young Garvey, the
director, "you come into the garden, see? You've
noticed Joyce go out through the French window
and you suspect she's gone to meet Talbot. We
show just a flash of you looking out of the drawing-
room windows into the garden. Then you just
glance over your shoulder to where your husband is
sitting in the library, reading, and you slip away,
see? Then we jump to where you find them in the
garden. Wait a minute" — He consulted the
sheaf of typewritten sheets in his hand — "yeh — here
it says : * Joyce is keeping her tryst under the great
oak in the garden with her lover.' Yeh. Wait a
minute . . . 'tryst under tree with' — well, you
come quickly forward — down to about here — and
you say : 'Ah, there you are !' '

Harrietta looked at him for a long, long minute.
Her lips were parted. Her breath came quickly.
She spoke: "I say — what?"

"You say : 'Ah, there you are.' '

"Never!" said Harrietta Fuller, and brought her
closed fist down on her open palm for emphasis.
"Never !"

It was August when she again was crossing desert,
plains, and farmlands. It was the tail-end of a

148 GIGOLO

dusty, hot, humid August in New York when Ken
stood at the station, waiting. As he came forward,
raising one arm, her own arm shot forward in quick
protest, even while her glad eyes held his.

"Don't take it off!"

"What off?"

"Your hat. Don't take it off. Kiss me — but
leave your hat on."

She clutched his arm. She looked up at him.
They were in the taxi bound for Fifty-sixth Street.
"She moved? She's out? She's gone? You told

her I'd pay her anything — a bonus " Then, as

he nodded, she leaned back, relaxed. Something in
her face prompted him.

''You're young and beautiful and bewitching,"
said Ken.

"Keep on saying it," pleaded Harrietta. "Make
a chant of it." . . .

Sam Klein, the veteran, was the first to greet her
when she entered the theatre at that first September
rehearsal. The company was waiting for her.
She wasn't late. She had just pleasantly escaped
being unpunctual. She came in, cool, slim, electric.
Then she hesitated. For the fraction of a second
she hesitated. Then Sam Klein greeted her: "Com-
pany's waiting, Miss Fuller, if you're ready." And
the leading man came forward, a flower in his button-
hole, carefully tailored and slightly yellow as a lead-

NOT A DAY OVER TWENTY-ONE 149

ing man of forty should be at 10:30 A. M. "How
wonderful you're looking, Harrietta," he said.

Sam Klein took her aside. "You're going to
make the hit of your career in this part, Miss Fuller.
Yessir, dear, the hit of your career. You mark
my words."

"Don't you think," stammered Harrietta — "don't
you think it will take someone — someone — younger
— to play the part?"

"Younger than what?"

"Than I."

Sam Klein stared. Then he laughed. "Younger
than you ! Say, listen, do you want to get the Gerry
Society after me?"

And as he turned away a Young Thing with
worshipful eyes crept up to Harrietta's side and said
tremulously: "Oh, Miss Fuller, this is my first
chance on Broadway, and may I tell you how happy
I am to be playing with you ? You've been my ideal
ever since I was a — for a long, long time."

HOME GIRL

WILSON AVENUE, Chicago, is not merely
an avenue but a district ; not only a dis-
trict but a state of mind ; not a state of
mind alone but a condition of morals. For that
matter, it is none of these things so much as a mode
of existence. If you know your Chicago — which you
probably don't — (sotto voce murmur, Heaven for-
bid !) — you are aware that, long ago, Wilson Avenue
proper crept slyly around the corner and achieved a
clandestine alliance with big glittering Sheridan
Road ; which escapade changed the demure thorough-
fare into Wilson Avenue improper.

When one says "A Wilson Avenue girl," the mind
— that is, the Chicago mind — pictures immediately
a slim, daring, scented, exotic creature dressed in
next week's fashions; wise-eyed; doll-faced; rapa-
cious. When chiffon stockings are worn Wilson
Avenue's hosiery is but a film over the flesh.
Aigrettes and mink coats are its winter uniform. A
feverish district this, all plate glass windows and
delicatessen dinners and one-room-and-kitchenette

150

HOME GIRL 151

apartments, where light housekeepers take their
housekeeping too lightly.

At six o'clock you are likely to see Wilson Avenue
scurrying about in its mink coat and its French
heels and its crepe frock, assembling its haphazard
dinner. Wilson Avenue food, as displayed in the
ready-cooked shops, resembles in a startling degree
the Wilson Avenue ladies themselves: highly col-
oured, artificial, chemically treated, tempting to the
eye, but unnutritious. In and out of the food em-
poria these dart, buying dabs of this and bits of that.
Chromatic viands. Vivid scarlet, orange, yellow,
green. A strip of pimento here. A mound of
mayonnaise there. A green pepper stuffed with
such burden of deceit as no honest green pepper ever
was meant to hold. Two eggs. A quarter-pound
of your best creamery butter. An infinitesimal bot-
tle of cream. "And what else?" says the plump
woman in the white bib-apron, behind the counter.
"And what else?" Nothing. I guess that'll be all.
Mink coats prefer to dine out.

As a cripple displays his wounds and sores,
proudly, so Wilson Avenue throws open its one-
room front door with a grandiloquent gesture as it
boasts, "Two hundred and fifty a month!" Shy-
lock, purchasing a paper-thin slice of pinky ham
in Wilson Avenue, would know his own early Venetian
transaction to have been pure philanthropy.

152 GIGOLO

It took Raymond and Cora Atwater twelve years
to reach this Wilson Avenue, though they carried it
with them all the way. They had begun their mar-
ried life in this locality before it had become a defi-
nite district. Twelve years ago the neighbourhood
had shown no signs of mushrooming into its present
opulence. Twelve years ago Raymond, twenty-
eight, and Cora, twenty-four, had taken a six-room
flat at Racine and Sunny side. Six rooms. Modern.
Light. Rental, $28.50 per month.

"But I guess I can manage it, all right," Ray-
mond had said. "That isn't so terrible — for six
rooms."

Cora's full under lip had drawn itself into a
surprisingly thin straight line. Later, Raymond
came to recognize the meaning of that labial warn-
ing. "We don't need all those rooms. It's just
that much more work."

"I don't want you doing your own work. Not
unless you want to. At first, maybe, it'd be sort
of fun for you. But after a while you'll want a
girl to help. That'll take the maid's room off the
kitchen."

"Well, supposing? That leaves an extra room,
anyway."

A look came into Raymond's face. "Maybe we'll
need that, too — later. Later on." He actually
could have been said to blush, then, like a boy.

HOME GIRL 153

There was much of the boy in Raymond at twenty-
eight.

Cora did not blush.

Raymond had married Cora because he loved her ;
and because she was what is known as a "home
girl." From the first, business girls — those alert,
pert, confident little sparrows of office and shop and
the street at lunch hour — rather terrified him.
They gave you as good as you sent. They were
always ready with their own nickel for carfare. You
never knew whether they were laughing at you or
not. There was a little girl named Calhoun in the
binoculars (Raymond's first Chicago job was with
the Erwin H. Nagel Optical Company on Wabash).
The Calhoun girl was smart. She wore those plain
white waists. Tailored, Raymond thought they
called them. They made her skin look fresh and
clear and sort of downy-blooming like the peaches
that grew in his own Michigan state back home.
Or perhaps only girls with clear fresh skins could
wear those plain white waist things. Raymond
had heard that girls thought and schemed about
things that were becoming to them, and then stuck
to those things. He wondered how the Calhoun
girl might look in a fluffy waist. But she never
wore one down to work. When business was dull
in the motor and sun-glasses (which was where he
held forth) Raymond would stroll over to Laura

154 GIGOLO

Calhoun's counter and talk. He would talk about
the Invention. He had no one else to talk to about
it. No one he could trust, or who understood.

The Calhoun girl, polishing the great black eyes
of a pair of field glasses, would look up brightly to
say, "Well, how's the Invention coming on?" Then
he would tell her.

The Invention had to do with spectacles. Not
only that, if you are a wearer of spectacles of any
kind, it has to do with you. For now, twelve years
later, you could not well do without it. The little
contraption that keeps the side-piece from biting
into your ears — that's Raymond's.

Knowing, as we do, that Raymond's wife is named
Cora we know that the Calhoun girl of the fresh
clear skin, the tailored white shirtwaists, and the
friendly interest in the Invention, lost out. The
reason for that was Raymond's youth, and Ray-
mond's vanity, and Raymond's unsophistication, to-
gether with Lucy Calhoun's own honesty and effi-
ciency. These last qualities would handicap any
girl in love, no matter how clear her skin or white
her shirtwaist.

Of course, when Raymond talked to her about
the Invention she should have looked adoringly
into his eyes and said, "How perfectly wonderful!
I don't see how you think of such things."

What she said, after studying its detail thought-

HOME GIRL 155

fully for a moment, was: "Yeh, but look. If this
little tiny wire had a spring underneath — just a
little bit of spring — it'd take all the pressure off
when you wear a hat. Now women's hats are worn
so much lower over their ears, d'you see? That'd
keep it from pressing. Men's hats, too, for that
matter."

She was right. Grudgingly, slowly, he admitted
it. Not only that, he carried out her idea and per-
fected the spectacle contrivance as you know it to-
day. Without her suggestion it would have had a
serious flaw. He knew he ought to be grateful. He
told himself that he was grateful. But in reality
he was resentful. She was a smart girl, but — well
— a fella didn't feel comfortable going with a girl
that knew more than he did. He took her to the
theatre — it was before the motion picture had at-
tained its present-day virulence. She enjoyed it.
So did he. Perhaps they might have repeated the
little festivity and the white shirtwaist might have
triumphed in the end. But that same week Ray-
mond met Cora.

Though he had come to Chicago from Michigan
almost a year before, he knew few people. The
Erwin H. Nagel Company kept him busy by day.
The Invention occupied him at night. He read, too,
books on optometry. Don't think that he was a
Hollo. He wasn't. But he was naturally some-

156 GIGOLO

what shy, and further handicapped by an unusually
tall lean frame which he handled awkwardly. If
you had a good look at his eyes you forgot his shy-
ness, his leanness, his awkwardness, his height. They
were the keynote of his gentle, studious, kindly,
humorous nature. But Chicago, Illinois, is too busy
looking to see anything. Eyes are something you
s«e with, not into.

Two of the boys at Nagel's had an engagement
for the evening with two girls who were friends. On
the afternoon of that day one of the boys went home
at four with a well-developed case of grippe. The
other approached Raymond with his plea.

"Say, Atwater, help me out, will you? I can't
reach my girl because she's downtown somewheres
for the afternoon with Cora. That's her girl friend.
And me and Harvey was to meet 'em for dinner, see?
And a show. I'm in a hole. Help me out, will
you? Go along and fuss Cora. She's a nice girl.
Pretty, too, Cora is. Will you, Ray? Huh?"

Ray went. By nine-thirty that evening he had
told Cora about the Invention. And Cora had
turned sidewise in her seat next to him at the theatre
and had looked up at him adoringly, awe-struck.
"Why, how perfectly wonderful! I don't see how
you think of such things."

"Oh, that's nothing. I got a lot of ideas. Things
I'm going to work out. Say, I won't always be

HOME GIRL 157

plugging down at Nagel's, believe me. I got a lot
of ideas."

"Really! Why, you're an inventor, aren't you!
Like Edison and those. My, it must be wonderful
to think of things out of your head. Things that
nobody's ever thought of before."

Ray glowed. He felt comfortable, and soothed,
and relaxed and stimulated. And too large for his
clothes. "Oh, I don't know. I just think of things.
That's all there is to it. That's nothing."

"Oh, isn't it! No, I guess not. I've never been
out with a real inventor before ... I bet you
think I'm a silly little thing."

He protested, stoutly. "I should say not." A
thought struck him. "Do you do anything? Work
downtown somewheres, or anything?"

She shook her head. Her lips pouted. Her eye-
brows made pained twin crescents. "No. I don't
do anything. I was afraid you'd ask that." She
looked down at her hands — her white, soft hands
with little dimples at the finger-bases. "I'm just
a home girl. That's all. A home girl. Now you
mil think I'm a silly stupid thing." She flashed
a glance at him, liquid-eyed, appealing.

He was surprised (she wasn't) to find his hand
closed tight and hard over her soft dimpled one.
He was terror-stricken (she wasn't) to hear his voice
saying, "I think you're wonderful. I think you're

158 GIGOLO

the most wonderful girl I ever saw, that's what."
He crushed her hand and she winced a little. "Home
girl."

Cora's name suited her to a marvel. Her hair
was black and her colouring a natural pink and
white, which she abetted expertly. Cora did not wear
plain white tailored waists. She wore thin, fluffy,
transparent things that drew your eyes and fired
your imagination. Raymond began to call her
Coral in his thoughts. Then, one evening, it slipped
out. Coral. She liked it. He denied himself all
luxuries and most necessities and bought her a
strand of beads of that name, presenting them to
her stammeringly, clumsily, tenderly. Tender pink
and cream, they were, like her cheeks, he thought.

"Oh, Ray, for me ! How darling ! You naughty
boy! . . . But I'd rather have had those clear
white ones, without any colouring. They're more
stylish. Do you mind?"

When he told Laura Calhoun she said, "I hope
you'll be very happy. She's a lucky girl. Tell me
about her, will you?"

Would he! His home girl!

When he had finished she said, quietly, "Oh, yes."

And so Raymond and Cora were married and
went to live in six-room elegance at Sunnyside and
Racine. The flat was furnished sumptuously in
Mission and those red and brown soft leather cush-

HOME GIRL 159

ions with Indian heads stamped on them. There
was a wooden rack on the wall with six monks' heads
in coloured plaster, very life-like, stuck on it. This
was a pipe-rack, though Raymond did not smoke a
pipe. He liked a mild cigar. Then there was a
print of Gustave Richter's "Queen Louise" coming
down that broad marble stair, one hand at her
breast, her great girlish eyes looking out at you
from the misty folds of her scarf. What a lot of
the world she has seen from her stairway ! The
shelf that ran around the dining room wall on a
level with your head was filled with steins in such
shapes and colours as would have curdled their con-
tents— if they had ever had any contents.

They planned to read a good deal, evenings. Im-
prove their minds. It was Ray's idea, but Cora
seconded it heartily. This was before their marriage.

"Now, take history alone," Ray argued: "Amer-
ican history. Why, you can read a year and hardly
know the half of it. That's the trouble. People
don't know the history of their own country. And
it's interesting, too, let me tell you. Darned
interesting. Better'n novels, if folks only knew
it."

"My, yes," Cora agreed. "And French. We
could take up French, evenings. I've always wanted
to study French. They say if you know French
you can travel anywhere. It's all in the accent;

160 GIGOLO

and goodness knows I'm quick at picking up things
like that."

"Yeh," Ray had said, a little hollowly, "yeh,
French, Sure."

But, somehow, these literary evenings never did
materialize. It may have been a matter of getting
the books. You could borrow them from the public
library, but that made you feel so hurried. History
was something you wanted to take your time over.
Then, too, the books you wanted never were in. You
could buy them. But buying books like that!
Cora showed her first real display of temper. Why,
they came in sets and cost as much as twelve or
fifteen dollars. Just for books ! The literary even-
ings degenerated into Ray's thorough scanning of
the evening paper, followed by Cora's skimming of
the crumpled sheets that carried the department
store ads, the society column, and the theatrical
news. Raymond began to use the sixth room — the
unused bedroom — as a workshop. He had perfected
the spectacle contrivance and had made the mistake
of selling his rights to it. He got a good sum for it.

"But I'll never do that again," he said, grimly.
"Somebody'll make a fortune on that thing." He
had unwisely told Cora of this transaction. She
never forgave him for it. On the day he received
the money for it he had brought her home a fur set
of baum marten. He thought the stripe in it beau-

HOME GIRL 161

tiful. There was a neckpiece known as a stole, and
a large muff.

"Oh, honey!" Cora had cried. "Aren't you fun-
ny I" She often said that, always with the same
accent. "Aren't you fun-uy !"

"What's the matter?"

"Why didn't you let me pick it out? They're
wearing Persian lamb sets."

"Oh. Well, maybe the feller'll change it. It's
all paid for, but maybe he'll change it."

"Do you mind? It may cost a little bit more.
You don't mind my changing it though, do
you?"

"No. No-o-o-o! Not a bit."

They had never furnished the unused bedroom as
a bedroom. When they moved out of the flat at
Racine and Sunnyside into one of those new four-
room apartments on Glengyle the movers found only
a long rough work-table and a green-shaded lamp in
that sixth room. Ray's delicate tools and imple-
ments were hard put to it to find a resting place in
the new four-room apartment. Sometimes Ray
worked in the bathroom. He grew rather to like the
white-tiled place, with its look of a laboratory.
But then, he didn't have as much time to work at
home as he formerly had had. They went out more
evenings.

The new four-room flat rented at sixty dollars.

162 GIGOLO

"Seems the less room you have the more you pay,"
Ray observed.

"There's no comparison. Look at the neighbour-
hood ! And the living room's twice as big."

It didn't seem to be. Perhaps this was due to its
furnishings. The Mission pieces had gone to the
second-hand dealer. Ray was assistant manager of
the optical department at Nagel's now and he was
getting royalties on a new smoked glass device.
There were large over-stuffed chairs in the new living
room, and a seven-foot davenport, and oriental rugs,
and lamps and lamps and lamps. The silk lamp-
shade conflagration had just begun to smoulder in
the American household. The dining room had one
of those built-in Chicago buffets. It sparkled with
cut glass. There was a large punch bowl in the
centre, in which Cora usually kept receipts, old bills,
moth balls, buttons, and the tarnished silver top to a
syrup jug that she always meant to have repaired.
Queen Louise was banished to the bedroom where she
surveyed a world of cretonne.

Cora was a splendid cook. She had almost a
genius for flavouring. Roast or cheese souffle or
green apple pie — your sense of taste never expe-
rienced that disappointment which comes of too little
salt, too much sugar, a lack of shortening. Expert
as she was at it, Cora didn't like to cook. That is,
she didn't like to cook day after day. She rather

HOME GIRL 163

liked doing an occasional meal and producing it in
a sort of red-cheeked triumph. When she did this
it was an epicurean thing, savoury, hot, satisfying.
But as a day-after-day programme Cora would not
hear of it. She had banished the maid. Four
rooms could not accommodate her. A woman came
in twice a week to wash and iron and clean. Often
Cora did not get up for breakfast and Ray got his
at one of the little lunch rooms that were springing
up all over that section of the North Side. Eleven
o'clock usually found Cora at the manicure's, or the
dressmaker's, or shopping, or telephoning luncheon
arrangements with one of the Crowd. Ray and
Cora were going out a good deal with the Crowd.
Young married people like themselves, living royally
just a little beyond their income. The women were
well-dressed, vivacious, somewhat shrill. They liked
stories that were a little off-colour. "Blue," one of
the men called these stories. He was in the theatri-
cal business. The men were, for the most part, a
rather drab-looking lot. Colourless, good-natured,
open-handed. Almost imperceptibly the Crowd be-
gan to use Ray as a target for a certain raillery.
It wasn't particularly ill-natured, and Ray did not
resent it.

"Oh, come on, Ray! Don't be a wet blanket.
. . . Lookit him! I bet he's thinking about
those smoked glasses again. Eh, Atwater? He's in

164 GIGOLO

a daze about that new rim that won't show on the
glasses. Come out of it! First thing you know
you'll lose your little Cora."

There was little danger of that. Though Cora
flirted mildly with the husbands of the other girls
in the Crowd (they all did) she was true to Ray.

Ray was always talking of building a little place
of their own. People were beginning to move
farther and farther north, into the suburbs.

"Little place of your own," Ray would say, "that's
the only way to live. Then you're not paying it
all out in rent to the other feller. Little place of
your own. That's the right idear."

But as the years went by, and Ray earned more
and more money, he and Cora seemed to be getting
farther and farther away from the right idear. In
the $28.50 apartment Cora's morning marketing had
been an orderly daily proceeding. Meat, vegetables,
fruit, dry groceries. But now the maidless four-
room apartment took on, in spite of its cumbersome
furnishings, a certain air of impermanence.

"Ray, honey, I haven't a scrap in the house. I
didn't get home until almost six. Those darned old
street cars. I hate 'em. Do you mind going over
[to Bauer's to eat ? I won't go, because Myrtle served
a regular spread at four. I couldn't eat a thing.
D'you mind?"

"Why, no." He would get into his coat again

HOME GIRL 165

and go out into the bleak November wind-swept
street to Bauer's restaurant.

Cora was always home when Raymond got there
at six. She prided herself on this. She would say,
primly, to her friends, "I make a point of being there
when Ray gets home. Even if I have to cut a round
of bridge. If a woman can't be there when a man
gets home from work I'd like to know what she's
good for, anyway."

The girls in the Crowd said she was spoiling Ray-
mond. She told Ray this. "They think I'm old-
fashioned. Well, maybe I am. But I guess I
never pretended to be anything but a home girl."

"That's right," Ray would answer. "Say, that's
the way you caught me. With that home-girl stuff."

"Caught you !" The thin straight line of the
mouth. "If you think for one minute "

"Oh, now, dear. You know what I mean, sweet-
heart. Why, say, I never could see any girl until
I met you. You know that."

He was as honestly in love with her as he had
been nine years before. Perhaps he did not feel
now, as then, that she had conferred a favour upon
him in marrying him. Or if he did he must have
known that he had made fair return for such favour.

Cora had a Hudson seal coat now, with a great
kolinsky collar. Her vivid face bloomed rosily in
this soft frame. Cora was getting a little heavier.

166 GIGOLO

Not stout, but heavier, somehow. She tried, futilely,
to reduce. She would starve herself at home for
days, only to gain back the vanished pounds at one
afternoon's orgy of whipped-cream salad, and coffee,
and sweets at the apartment of some girl in the
Crowd. Dancing had come in and the Crowd had
taken it up vociferously. Raymond was not very
good at it. He had not filled out with the years.
He still was lean and tall and awkward. The girls
in the crowd tried to avoid dancing with him. That
often left Cora partnerless unless she wanted to
dance again and again with Raymond.

"How can you expect the boys to ask me to dance
when you don't dance with their wives ! Good
heavens, if they can learn, you can. And for pity's
sake don't count! You're so /ww-ny!"

He tried painstakingly to heed her advice, but his
long legs made a sorry business of it. He heard one
of the girls refer to him as "that giraffe." He had
put his foot through an absurd wisp of tulle that
she insisted on calling a train.

They were spending a good deal of money now, but
Ray jousted the landlord, the victualler, the fur-
rier, the milliner, the hosiery maker, valiantly and
still came off the victor. He did not have as much
time as he would have liked to work on the new in-
vention. The invisible rim. It was calculated so
to blend with the glass of the lens as to be, in ap-

HOME GIRL 167

pearance, one with it, while it still protected the eye-
glass from breakage. "Fortune in it, girlie," he
would say, happily, to Cora. "Million dollars, that's
all."

He had been working on the invisible rim for five
years. Familiarity with it had bred contempt in
Cora. Once, in a temper, "Invisible is right," she
had said, slangily.

They had occupied the four-room apartment for
five years. Cora declared it was getting beyond
her. "You can't get any decent help. The wash-
woman acts as if she was doing me a favour coming
from eight to four, for four dollars and eighty-five
cents. And yesterday she said she couldn't come to
clean any more on Saturdays. I'm sick and tired
of it."

Raymond shook a sympathetic head. "Same way
down at the store. Seems everything's that way
now. You can't get help and you can't get goods.
You ought to hear our customers. Yesterday I
thought I'd go clear out of my nut, trying to pacify
them."

Cora inserted the entering wedge, deftly. "Good-
ness knows I love my home. But the way things are
now . . ."

"Yeh," Ray said, absently. When he spoke like
that Cora knew that the invisible rim was revolving
in his mind. In another moment he would be off to

168 GIGOLO

the little cabinet in the bathroom where he kept his
tools and instruments.

She widened the opening. "I noticed as I passed
to-day that those new one-room kitchenette apart-
ments on Sheridan will be ready for occupancy
October first." He was going toward the door.
"They say they're wonderful."

"Who wants to live in one room, anyway?"

"It's really two rooms — and the kitchenette.
There's the living room — perfectly darling — and a
sort of combination breakfast room and kitchen.
The breakfast room is partitioned off with sort of
cupboards so that it's really another room. And
so handy!"

"How'd you know?"

"I went in — just to look at them — with one of
the girls."

Until then he had been unconscious of her guile.
But now, suddenly, struck by a hideous suspicion —
"Say, looka here. If you think "

"Well, it doesn't hurt to look at 'em, does it !"

A week later. "Those kitchenette apartments on
Sheridan are almost all gone. One of the girls was
looking at one on the sixth floor. There's a view
of the lake. The kitchen's the sweetest thing. All
white enamel. And the breakfast room thing is
done in Italian."

"What d'you mean — done in Italian?"

HOME GIRL 169

"Why — uh — Italian period furniture, you know.
Dark and rich. The living room's the same. Desk,
and table, and lamps."

"Oh, they're furnished?"

"Complete. Down to the kettle covers and the
linen and all. The work there would just be play.
All the comforts of a home, with none of the terrible
aggravations."

"Say, look here, Coral, we don't want to go to
work and live in any one room. You wouldn't be
happy. Why, we'd feel cooped up. No room to
stretch. . . . Why, say, how about the beds?
If there isn't a bedroom how about the beds ? Don't
people sleep in those places?"

"There are Murphy beds, silly."

"Murphy? Who's he?"

"Oh, goodness, I don't know! The man who in-
vented 'em, I suppose. Murphy."

Raymond grinned in anticipation of his own forth-
coming joke. "I should think they'd call 'em
Morphy beds." Then, at her blank stare. "You
know — short for Morpheus, god of sleep. Learned
about him at high school."

Cora still looked blank. Cora hardly ever under-
stood Ray's jokes, or laughed at them. He would
turn, chuckling, to find her face a blank. Not even
bewildered, or puzzled, or questioning. Blank. Un-
heeding. Disinterested as a slate.

170 GIGOLO

Three days later Cora developed an acute pain
in her side. She said it was nothing. Just worn
out with the work, and the worry and the aggrava-
tion, that's all. It'll be all right.

Ray went with her to look at the Sheridan Road
apartment. It was one hundred and fifty dollars.
"Phew !"

"But look at what you save? Gas. Light. Maid
service. Laundry. It's really cheaper in the
end."

Cora was amazingly familiar with all the advan-
tages and features of the sixth-floor apartment.
"The sun all morning." She had all the agent's
patter. "Harvey-Dickson ventilated double-spring
mattresses. Dressing room off the bathroom. No,
it isn't a closet. Here's the closet. Range, refrig-
erator, combination sink and laundry tub. Living
room's all panelled in ivory. Shower in the bath-
room. Buffet kitchen. Breakfast room has fold-
ing-leaf Italian table. Look at the chairs. Aren't
they darlings ! Built-in book shelves "

"Book shelves?"

"Oh, well, we can use them for fancy china and
ornaments. Or — oh, look! — you could keep your
stuff there. Tools and all. Then the bathroom
wouldn't be mussy all the time."

"Beds?"

"Right here. Isn't that wonderful. Would you

HOME GIRL 171

ever know it was there? You can work it with one
hand. Look."

"Do you really like it, Coral?"

"I love it. It's heavenly."

He stood in the centre of the absurd living room,
a tall, lank, awkward figure, a little stooped now.
His face was beginning to be furrowed with lines —
deep lines that yet were softening, and not unlovely.
He made you think, somehow, as he stood there, one
hand on his own coat lapel, of Saint-Gaudens' fig-
ure of Lincoln, there in the park, facing the Drive.
Kindly, thoughtful, harried.

They moved in October first.

The over-stuffed furniture of the four-room apart-
ment was sold. Cora kept a few of her own things
— a rug or two, some china, silver, bric-a-brac,
lamps. Queen Louise was now permanently de-
throned. Cora said her own things — "pieces" —
would spoil the effect of the living room. All Italian.

"No wonder the Italians sit outdoors all the time,
on the steps and in the street" — more of Ray's dull
humour. He surveyed the heavy gloomy pieces, .so
out of place in the tiny room. One of the chairs
was black velvet. It was the only really comfort-
able chair in the room but Ray never sat in it. It
reminded him, vaguely, of a coffin. The corridors
of the apartment house were long, narrow, and
white-walled. You traversed these like a convict,

172 GIGOLO

speaking to no one, and entered your own cubicle.
A toy dwelling for toy people. But Ray was a
man-size man. When he was working downtown
his mind did not take temporary refuge in the
thought of the feverish little apartment to which he
was to return at night. It wasn't a place to
come back to, except for sleep. A roost. Bed-
ding for the night. As permanent-seeming as a
hay-mow.

Cora, too, gave him a strange feeling of imperma-
nence. He realized one day, with a shock, that he
hardly ever saw her with her hat off. When he
came in at six or six-thirty Cora would be busy at
the tiny sink, or the toy stove, her hat on, a ciga-
rette dangling limply from her mouth. Ray did
not object to women smoking. That is, he had no
moral objection. But he didn't think it became
them. But Cora said a cigarette rested and stim-
ulated her. "Doctors say all nervous women should
smoke," she said. "Soothes them." But Cora,
cooking in the little kitchen, squinting into a kettle's
depths through a film of cigarette smoke, outraged
his sense of fitness. It was incongruous, offensive.
The time, and occupation, and environment, to-
gether with the limply dangling cigarette, gave her
an incredibly rowdy look.

When they ate at home they had steak or chops,
and, perhaps, a chocolate eclair for dessert; and a

HOME GIRL 173

salad. Raymond began to eat mental meals. He
would catch himself thinking of breaded veal chops,
done slowly, simmeringly, in butter, so that they
came out a golden brown on a parsley-decked platter.
With this mashed potatoes with brown butter and
onions that have just escaped burning; creamed
spinach with egg grated over the top; a rice pud-
ding, baked in the oven, and served with a tart crown
of grape jell. He sometimes would order these
things in a restaurant at noon, or on the frequent
evenings when they dined out. But they never
tasted as he had thought they would.

They dined out more and more as spring drew
on and the warm weather set in. The neighbour-
hood now was aglitter with eating places of all sorts
and degrees, from the humble automat to the proud
plush of the Sheridan Plaza dining room. There
were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafes, chop
suey restaurants. At the table d'hote places you
got a soup, followed by a lukewarm plateful of meat,
vegetables, salad. The meat tasted of the vege-
tables, the vegetables tasted of the meat, and the
salad tasted of both. Before ordering Ray would
sit down and peer about at the food on the near-by
tables as one does in a dining car when the digestive
fluids have dried in your mouth at the first whiff
through the doorway. It was on one of these even-
ings that he noticed Cora's hat.

174 GIGOLO

"What do you wear a hat for all the time?" he
asked, testily.

"Hat?"

"Seems to me I haven't seen you without a hat in
a month. Gone bald, or something?" He was
often cross like this lately. Grumpy, Cora called
it. Hats were one of Cora's weaknesses. She had a
great variety of them. These added to Ray's feeling
of restlessness and impermanence. Sometimes she
wore a hat that came down over her head, covering
her forehead and her eyes, almost. The hair he
used to love to touch was concealed. Sometimes he
dined with an ingenue in a poke bonnet; sometimes
with a senorita in black turban and black lace veil,
mysterious and provocative; sometimes with a de-
mure miss in a wistful little turned-down brim. It
was like living with a stranger who was always about
to leave.

When they ate at home, which was rarely, Ray
tried, at first, to dawdle over his coffee and his mild
cigar, as he liked to do. But you couldn't dawdle
at a small, inadequate table that folded its flaps and
shrank into a corner the minute you left it. Every-
thing in the apartment folded, or flapped, or doubled,
or shot in, or shot out, or concealed something else,
or pretended to be something it was not. It was
very irritating. Ray took his cigar and his evening
paper and wandered uneasily into the Italian living

HOME GIRL 175

room, doubling his lean length into one of his queer,
angular hard chairs.

Cora would appear in the doorway, hatted.
"Ready?"

"Huh? Where you going?"

"Oh, Ray, aren't you fun-ny\ You know this is
the Crowd's poker night at Lil's."

The Crowd began to say that old Ray was going
queer. Honestly, didja hear him last week? Talk-
ing about the instability of the home, and the
home being the foundation of the state, and the
country crumbling? Cora's face was a sight!
I wouldn't have wanted to be in his boots when
she got him home. What's got into him, any-
way?

Cora was a Wilson Avenue girl now. You saw her
in and out of the shops of the district, expensively
dressed. She was almost thirty-six. Her legs, be-
neath the absurdly short skirt of the day, were
slim and shapely in their chiffon hose, but her upper
figure was now a little prominent. The scant, brief
skirt fore-shortened her; gave her a stork-like ap-
pearance; a combination of girlishness and matron-
liness not pleasing.

There were times when Ray rebelled. A peace-
loving man, and gentle. But a man. "I don't
want to go out to eat. My God, I'm tired! I
want to eat at home."

176 GIGOLO

"Honey, dear, I haven't a thing in the house.
Not a scrap."

"I'll go out and get something, then. What d'you
want?"

"Get whatever looks good to you. I don't want
a thing. We had tea after the matinee. That's
what mdde me so late. I'm always nagging the
girls to go home. It's getting so they tease me
about it."

He would go foraging amongst the delicatessen
shops of the neighbourhood. He saw other men,
like himself, scurrying about with moist paper pack-
ets and bags and bundles, in and out of Leviton's,
in and out of the Sunlight Bakery. A bit of ham.
Some cabbage salad in a wooden boat. A tiny
broiler, lying on its back, its feet neatly trussed,
its skin crackly and tempting-looking, its white meat
showing beneath the brown. But when he cut into
it at home it tasted like sawdust and gutta-percha.
"And what else?" said the plump woman in the
white bib-apron behind the counter. "And what
else?"

In the new apartment you rather prided yourself
on not knowing your next-door neighbours. The
paper-thin walls permitted you to hear them living
the most intimate details of their lives. You heard
them laughing, talking, weeping, singing, scolding,
caressing. You didn't know them. You did not

HOME GIRL 177

even see them. When you met in the halls or elevat-
ors you did not speak. Then, after they had lived
in the new apartment about a year Cora met the
woman in 618 and Raymond met the woman in 620,
within the same week. The Atwaters lived in 619.

There was some confusion in the delivery of a
package. The woman in 618 pressed the Atwaters'
electric button for the first time in their year's
residence there.

A plump woman, 618 ; blonde ; in black. You felt
that her flesh was expertly restrained in tight pink
satin brassieres and long-hipped corsets and many
straps.

"I hate to trouble you, but did you get a pack-
age for Mrs. Hoyt? It's from Field's."

It was five-thirty. Cora had her hat on. She
did not ask the woman to come in. "I'll see. I
ordered some things from Field's to-day, too. I
haven't opened them yet. Perhaps yours . . .
I'll look."

The package with Mrs. Hoyt's name on it was
there. "Well, thanks so much. It's some georgette
crepe. I'm making myself one those new two-tone
slip-over negligees. Field's had a sale. Only one
sixty-nine a yard."

Cora was interested. She sewed rather well when
she was in the mood. "Are they hard to make?"

"Oh, land, no! No trick to it at all. They just

178 GIGOLO

hang from the shoulder, see? Like a slipover.
And then your cord comes round '

She stepped in. She undid the box and shook
out the vivid folds of the filmy stuff, vivid green and
lavender. "You wouldn't think they'd go well to-
gether but they do. Makes a perfectly stunning
negligee."

Cora fingered the stuff. "I'd get some. Only I
don't know if I could cut the "

"I'll show you. Glad to." She was very friendly.
Cora noticed she used expensive perfume. Her hair
was beautifully marcelled. The woman folded up
the material and was off, smiling. "Just let me
know when you get it. I've got a lemon cream pie
in the oven and I've got to run." She called back
over her shoulder. "Mrs. Hoyt."

Cora nodded and smiled. "Mine's Atwater."
She saw that the woman's simple-seeming black
dress was one she had seen in a Michigan Avenue
shop, and had coveted. Its price had been beyond
her purse.

Cora mentioned the meeting to Ray when he
came home. "She seems real nice. She's going to
show me how to cut out a new negligee."

"What'd you say her name was?" She told him.
He shrugged. "Well, I'll say this: she must be
some swell cook. Whenever I go by that door at
dinner time my mouth just waters. One night last

HOME GIRL 179

week there was something must have been baked
spare-ribs and sauerkraut. I almost broke in the
door."

The woman in 618 did seem to cook a great deal.
That is, when she cooked. She explained that Mr.
Hoyt was on the road a lot of the time and when
he was home she liked to fuss for him. This when
she was helping Cora cut out the georgette negligee.

"I'd get coral colour if I was you, honey. With
your hair and all," Mrs. Hoyt had advised her.

"Why, that's my name! That is, it's what Ray
calls me. My name's really Cora." They were
quite good friends now.

It was that same week that Raymond met the
woman in 620. He had left the apartment half an
hour later than usual (he had a heavy cold, and had
not slept) and encountered the man and woman just
coming out of 620.

"And guess who it was!" he exclaimed to Cora
that evening. "It was a girl who used to work at
Nagel's, in the binoculars, years ago, when I started
there. Calhoun, her name was. Laura Calhoun.
Smart little girl, she was. She's married now. And
guess what! She gets a big salary fitting glasses
for women at the Bazaar. She learned to be an
optician. Smart girl."

Cora bridled, virtuously. "Well, I think she'd
better stay home and take care of that child of hers.

180 GIGOLO

I should think she'd let her husband earn the living.
That child is all soul alone when she comes home
from school. I hear her practising. I asked Mrs.
Hoyt about her. She say's she's seen her. A pin-
dling scrawny little thing, about ten years old. She
leaves her alone all day."

Ray encountered the Calhoun girl again, shortly
after that, in the way encounters repeat them-
selves, once they have started.

"She didn't say much but I guess her husband
is a nit-wit. Funny how a smart girl like that
always marries one of these sap-heads that can't
earn a living. She said she was working because
she wanted her child to have the advantages she'd
missed. That's the way she put it."

One heard the long-legged, melancholy child next
door practising at the piano daily at four. Cora
said it drove her crazy. But then, Cora was rarely
home at four. "Well," she said now, virtuously, "I
don't know what she calls advantages. The way she
neglects that kid. Look at her! I guess if she
had a little more mother and a little less education
it'd be better for her."

"Guess that's right," Ray agreed.

It was in September that Cora began to talk about
the mink coat. A combination anniversary and
Christmas gift. December would mark their twelfth
anniversary. A mink coat.

HOME GIRL 181

Raymond remembered that his mother had had a
mink coat, back there in Michigan, years ago. She
always had taken it out in November and put it
away in moth balls and tar paper in March. She
had done this for years and years. It was a cheer-
ful yellow mink, with a slightly darker marking run-
ning through it, and there had been little mink tails
all around the bottom edge of it. It had spread
comfortably at the waist. Women had had hips in
those days. With it his mother had carried a mink
muff; a small yellow-brown cylinder just big enough
for her two hands. It had been her outdoor uniform,
winter after winter, for as many years as he could
remember of his boyhood. When she had died the
mink coat had gone to his sister Carrie, he re-
membered.

A mink coat. The very words called up in his
mind sharp winter days ; the pungent moth-bally
smell of his mother's fur-coated bosom when she had
kissed him good-bye that day he left for Chicago;
comfort ; womanliness. A mink coat.

"How much could you get one for? A mink
coat."

Cora hesitated a moment. "Oh — I guess you
could get a pretty good one for three thousand."

"You're crazy," said Ray, unemotionally. He
was not angry. He was amused.

But Cora was persistent. Her coat was a sight.

182 GIGOLO

She had to have something. She never had had a
real fur coat.

"How about your Hudson seal?"

"Hudson seal ! Did you ever see any seals in the
Hudson ! Fake fur. I've never had a really decent
piece of fur in my life. Always some mangy make-
believe. All the girls in the Crowd are getting new
coats this year. The woman next door — Mrs. Hoyt
— is talking of getting one. She says Mr. Hoyt "

"Say, who are these Hoyts, anyway?"

Ray came home early one day to find the door to
618 open. He glanced in, involuntarily. A man
sat in the living room — a large, rather red-faced
man, in his shirt-sleeves, relaxed, comfortable, at
ease. From the open door came the most tantaliz-
ing and appetizing smells of candied sweet potatoes,
a browning roast, steaming vegetables.

Mrs. Hoyt had run in to bring a slice of fresh-
baked chocolate cake to Cora. She often brought
in dishes of exquisitely prepared food thus, but Ray-
mond had never before encountered her. Cora in-
troduced them. Mrs. Hoyt smiled, nervously, and
said she must run away and tend to her dinner.
And went. Ray looked after her. He strode into
the kitchenette where Cora stood, hatted, at the
sink.

"Say, looka here, Cora. You got to quit seeing
that woman, see?"

HOME GIRL 183

"What woman?"

"One calls herself Mrs. Hoyt. That woman.
Mrs. Hoyt! Ha!"

"Why, Ray, what in the world are you talking
about ! Aren't you fun-ny !"

"Yeh; well, you cut her out. I won't have you
running around with a woman like that. Mrs.
Hoyt! Mrs. Fiddlesticks!"

They had a really serious quarrel about it. When
the smoke of battle cleared away Raymond had paid
the first instalment on a three thousand dollar mink
coat. And, "If we could sub-lease," Cora said, "I
think it would be wonderful to move to the Shoreham.
Lil and Harry are going there in January. You
know yourself this place isn't half respectable."

Raymond had stared. "Shoreham! Why, it's a
hotel. Regular hotel."

"Yes," placidly. "That's what's so nice about it.
No messing around in a miserable little kitchenette.
You can have your meals sent up. Or you can go
down to the dining room. Lil says it's wonderful.
And if you order for one up in your room the por-
tions are big enough for two. It's really economy,
in the end."

"Nix," said Ray. "No hotel in mine. A little
house of our own. That's the right idear. Build."

"But nobody's building now. Materials are so
high. It'll cost you ten times as much as it would if

184 GIGOLO

you waited a few — a little while. And no help. No
maids coming over, hardly. I think you might con-
sider me a little. We could live at the Shoreham a
while, anyway. By that time things will be better,
and we'd have money saved up and then we might
talk of building. Goodness knows I love my home
as well as any woman "

They looked at the Shoreham rooms on the after-
noon of their anniversary. They were having the
Crowd to dinner, downtown, that evening. Cora
thought the Shoreham rooms beautiful, though she
took care not to let the room-clerk know she thought
so. Ray, always a silent, inarticulate man, was so
wordless that Cora took him to task for it in a
sibilant aside.

"Ray, for heaven's sake say something. You
stand there! I don't know what the man'll think."

"A hell of a lot I care what he thinks." Ray was
looking about the garish room — plush chairs, heavy
carpets, brocade hangings, shining table-top, silly
desk.

"Two hundred and seventy-five a month," the
clerk was saying. "With the yearly lease, of course.
Otherwise it's three twenty-five." He seemed quite
indifferent.

Ray said nothing. "We'll let you know," said
Cora.

The man walked to the door. "I can't hold it for

HOME GIRL 185

you, you know. Our apartments are practically
gone. I've a party who practically has closed for
this suite already. I'd have to know."

Cora looked at Ray. He said nothing. He seemed
not to have heard. His face was gaunt and hag-
gard. "We'll let you know — to-morrow," Cora said.
Her full under lip made a straight thin line.

When they came out it was snowing. A sudden
flurry. It was already dark. "Oh, dear," said
Cora. "My hat !" Ray summoned one of the hotel
taxis. He helped Cora into it. He put money into
the driver's hand.

"You go on, Cora. I'm going to walk."

"Walk! Why! But it's snowing. And you'll
have to dress for dinner."

"I've got a little headache. I thought I'd walk.
I'll be home. I'll be home."

He slammed the door then, and turned away. He
began to walk in the opposite direction from that
which led toward the apartment house. The snow
felt cool and grateful on his face. It stung his
cheeks. Hard and swift and white it came, blinding
him. A blizzard off the lake. He plunged through
it, head down, hands jammed into his pockets.

So. A home girl. Home girl. God, it was funny.
She was a selfish, idle, silly, vicious woman. She
was nothing. Nothing. It came over him in a
sudden blinding crashing blaze of light. The wo-

186 GIGOLO

man in 618 who wasn't married to her man, and who
cooked and planned to make him comfortable; the
woman in 620 who blindly left her home and her child
every day in order to give that child the thing she
called advantages — either of these was better than
his woman. Honester. Helping someone. Trying
to, anyway. Doing a better job than she was.

He plunged across the street, blindly, choking a
little with the bitterness that had him by the throat.

Hey! Watcha! A shout rising to a scream.

A bump. Numbness. Silence. Nothingness.

"Well, anyway, Cora," said the girls in the Crowd,
"you certainly were a wonderful wife to him. You
can always comfort yourself with that thought.
My! the way you always ran home so's to be there
before he got in."

"I know it," said Cora, mournfully. "I always
was a home girl. Why, we always had planned we
should have a little home of our own some day. He
always said that was the right idear — idea."

Lil wiped her eyes. "What are you going to do
about your new mink coat, Cora ?"

Cora brushed her hair away from her forehead
with a slow, sad gesture. "Oh, I don't know. I've
hardly thought of such trifling things. The woman
next door said she might buy it. Hoyt, her name is.
Of course I couldn't get what we paid for it, though

HOME GIRL 187

I've hardly had it on. But money'll count with me
now. Ray never did finish that invisible rim he was
working on all those years. Wasting his time.
Poor Ray. ... I thought if she took it, I'd get
a caracul, with a black fox collar. After I bought
it I heard mink wasn't so good anyway, this year.
Everything's black. Of course, I'd never have said
anything to Raymond about it. I'd just have worn
it. I wouldn't have hurt Ray for the world."

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL!

WHEN a child grows to boyhood, and a
boy to manhood under the soul-searing
, blight of a given name like Florian, one
of two things must follow. He will degenerate into
a weakling, crushed beneath the inevitable diminutive
— Flossie ; or he will build up painfully, inch by inch,
a barrier against the name's corroding action. He
will boast of his biceps, flexing them the while. He
will brag about cold baths. He will prate of chest
measurements ; regard golf with contempt ; and speak
of the West as God's country.

Florian Sykes was five feet three and a half, and
he liked to quote those red-blooded virile poems
about the big open spaces out where the West begins.
The biggest open space in his experience was Mad-
ison Square, New York ; and Eighth Avenue spelled
the Far West for him. When Florian spoke or
thought of great heights it was never in terms of
nature, such as mountains, but in artificial ones,
like skyscrapers. Yet his job depended on what he
called the great outdoors.

188

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 189

The call of the wild, by the time it had filtered into
his city abode, was only a feeble cheep. But he
answered it daily from his rooms to the store in the
morning, from the store to his rooms in the evening.
It must have been fully ten blocks each way. There
are twenty New York blocks to the mile. He threw
out his legs a good deal when he walked and came
down with his feet rather flat, and he stooped ever
so little with the easy slouch that came in with the
one-button sack suit. It's the walk you see used by
English actors of the what-what school who come
over here to play gentlemanly juveniles.

Down at Inverness & Heath's they called him
Nature's Rival, but that was mostly jealousy, with
a strong dash of resentment. Two of the men in his
department had been Maine guides, and another
boasted that he knew the Rockies as he knew the
palm of his hand. But Florian, whose trail-finding
had all been done in the subway shuttle, and who
thought that butter sauce with parsley was a trout's
natural element, had been promoted above their
heads half a dozen times until now he lorded it over
the fifth floor.

Not one of you, unless bedridden from birth, but
has felt the influence of the firm of Inverness & Heath.
You may never have seen the great establishment
itself, rising story on story just off New York's main
shopping thoroughfare. But you have felt the call

190 GIGOLO

of their catalogue. Surely at one time or another,
they have supplied you with tents or talcum; with
sleeping-bags or skis or skates ; with rubber boots, or
resin or reels. On their fourth floor you can be
hatted for Palm Beach or booted for Skagway.
On the third, outfitted for St. Moritz or San An-
tonio. But the fifth floor is the pride of the store.
There is the camper's dream realized. There you
will find man's most ingenious devices for softening
Mother Nature's flinty bosom. Mosquito-proof
tents ; pails that will not leak ; fleece-lined sleeping-
bags ; cooking outfits made up of pots and pans of
every size, each shaped to disappear mysteriously
into the next, like a conjurer's outfit, the whole
swallowed up by a magic leather case.

Here Florian reigned. If you were a regular Inver-
ness & Heath customer you learned to ask for him
as soon as the elevator tossed you up to his domain.
He met you with what is known in the business effi-
ciency guides as the strong personality greeting.
It consisted in clasping your hand with a grip that
drove your ring into the bone, looking you straight
in the eye, registering alert magnetic force, and pro-
nouncing your name very distinctly. Like this:
hand-clasp firm — straight in the eye — "How do you
do, Mr. Outertown. Haven't seen you since last
June. How was the trip?" He didn't mean to be a
liar. And yet he lied daily and magnificently for

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 191

years, to the world and himself. When, for example,
in the course of purchasing rods, flies, tents, canoes,
saddles, boots, or sleeping-bags of him, you spoke
of the delights of your contemplated vacation, he
would say, "That's the life. I'm a Western man,
myself. . . . God's country!" He said it with
a deep breath, and an exhalation, as one who pants
to be free of the city's noisome fumes. You felt he
must have been born with an equipment of chaps,
quirts, spurs, and sombrero. You see him flinging
himself on a horse and clattering off with a flirt of
hoofs as they do it in the movies. His very manner
sketched in a background of plains, mountains, six-
shooters, and cacti.

The truth of it was Florian Sykes had been born
in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At the age of three he had
been brought to New York by a pair of inexpert and
migratory parents. Their reasons for migrating
need not concern us. They must, indeed, have been
bad reasons. For Florian, at thirteen, a spindle-
legged errand-boy in over-size knickers, a cold sore
on his lip, and shoes chronically in need of re-
soling, had started to work for the great sport-
ing goods store of Inverness & Heath.

Now, at twenty-nine, he was head of the fifth
floor. The cold sore had vanished permanently
under a regime of health-food, dumb-bells, and icy
plunges. The shoes were bench-made and flawless.

192 GIGOLO

If the legs still were somewhat spindling their cor-
rectly creased casings hid the fact.

There's little doubt that if Florian had been
named Bill, and if the calves of his legs had bulged,
and if, in his youth, he had gone to work for a whole-
sale grocer, he would never have forged for himself
a coat of mail whose links were pretense and whose
bolts were sham. He probably would have been
frankly content with the sight of an occasional ball-
game out at the Polo Grounds, and the newspaper
bulletins of a prizefight by rounds. But here he was
at the base that supplied America's outdoor equip-
ment. He who ^outfitted mountaineers must speak
knowingly of glaciers, chasms, crevices, and peaks.
He who advised canoeists must assume wisdom of
paddles, rapids, currents, and portages. He whose
sleeping hours were spangled with the clang of the
street cars must counsel such hardy ones as were pre-
paring cheerfully to seek rest rolled in blankets
before a camp-fire's dying embers. And so, slowly,
year by year, in his rise from errand to stock boy,
from stock boy to clerk, from clerk to assistant
manager, thence to his present official position, he
had built about himself a tissue of innocent lies.
He actually believed them himself.

Sometimes a customer who in June had come in to
purchase his vacation supplies with the city pallor
upon him, returned in September, brown, hard,

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 193

energized, to thank Florian for the comfort of the
outfit supplied him.

"I just want to tell you, Sykes, that that was a
great little outfit you sold me. Yessir! Not a
thing too much, and not a thing too little, either.
Remember how I kicked about that air mattress?
Well, say, it saved my life ! I slept like a baby every
night. And the trip! You've been there, haven't
you?"

Florian would smile and nod his head. His grate-
ful customer would clap him on the shoulder. "Some
pebble, that mountain!"

"Get to the top?" Florian would ask.

"Well, we didn't do the peak. That is, not right
to the top. Started to a couple of times, but the
girls got tired, and we didn't want to leave 'em
alone. Pretty stiff climb, let me tell you, young
feller."

"You should have made the top."

"Been up, have you?"

"A dozen times."

"Oh, well, that's your business, you might say.
Next time, maybe, we'll do it. The missus says
she wants to go back there every year."

Florian would shake his head. "Oh, you don't
want to do that. Have you been out to Glacier?
Have you done the Yellowstone on horseback? Ever
been down the Grand Canyon?"

194 GIGOLO

"Why— no— but "

"You've got a few thrills coming to you then."

The sunburned traveller would flush mahogany.
"That's all right for you to say. But I'm no cham-
ois. But it was a great trip, just the same. I
want to thank you."

Then, for example, Florian's clothes. He had
adopted that careful looseness — that ease of fit —
that skilful sloppiness — which is the last word in
masculine sartorial smartness. In talking he dropped
his final g's and said "sportin' " and "mountain
climbin' " and "shootin'." From June until Septem-
ber he wore those Norfolk things with bow ties, and
his shirt patterns were restrained to the point of
austerity. A signet ring with a large scrolled mono-
gram on the third finger of his right hand was his
only ornament, and he had worn a wrist watch long
before the War. He had never seen a mountain.
The ocean meant Coney Island. He breakfasted
at Child's. He spent two hours over the Sunday
papers. He was a Tittlebat Titmouse without the
whiskers. And Myra loved him.

If Florian had not pretended to be something he
wasn't ; and if he had not professed an enthusiastic
knowledge of things of which he was ignorant, he
would, in the natural course of events, have loved
Myra quickly in return. In fact, he would have ad-
mitted that he had loved her first, and desperately.

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 195

And there would have been no story entitled, "Ain't
Nature Wonderful!"

Myra worked in the women's and misses', third
floor, and she didn't care a thing about the big out-
doors or the great open spaces. She didn't even
pretend to — at first. A clear-eyed, white-throated,
capable young woman, almost poignantly pretty.
You sensed it was the kind of loveliness that fades
a bit with marriage. In its place come two sturdy
babies to carry on the torch of beauty. You sensed,
too, that Myra would keep their noses wiped, their
knees scrubbed, and their buttons buttoned and
that, between a fresh blouse for herself and fresh
rompers for them, the blouse would always lose.

She hated discomfort, did Myra, as does one who
has always had too much of it. After you have
stood all day, from 8 :30 A. M. to 5 :30 p. M., selling
sweaters, riding togs, golf clothes, and trotteurs to
athletic Dianas whose lines are more lathe than lithe,
you can't work up much enthusiasm about exercis-
ing for the pure joy of it. Myra had never used a
tennis-racket in her life, but daily she outfitted for
the sport bronzed young ladies who packed a nasty
back-hand wallop in their right. She wore (and was
justly proud of) a 4- A shoe, and took a good deal
of comfort in the fact as she sold 7-Cs at $22.50 a
pair to behemothian damsels who possessed money
in proportion to Myra's beauty. Myra was the

196 GIGOLO

only girl in her section who never tried to dress in
imitation of the moneyed ones whom she served.
The other girls were wont to wear severely tailored
shirts, mannish ties, stocks, flat-heeled shoes, rough
tweed skirts. Not so Myra. That delicate cup-
like hollow at the base of her white throat was fit-
tingly framed in a ruffle of frilly georgette. She
did her hair in soft undulations that flowed away
from forehead and temple, and she powdered her
nose a hundred times a day. Her little shoes were
high-heeled and her hands were miraculously white,
and if you prefer Rosalind to Viola you'd better quit
her now.

"Anybody who wants to wear those cross-country
clothes is welcome to them," she said. "I'm a girl
and I'm satisfied to be. I don't see why I should
wear a hard-boiled shirt and a necktie any more than
a man should wear a pink georgette trimmed with
filet. By the end of the week, when I've spent six
solid days selling men's clothes to women, I feel's
if I'd die happy if I could take a milk bath and put
on white satin and pearls and a train six yards
long from the shoulders — you know."

Not the least of Myra's charm was a certain un-
expected and pleasing humour. It was as though,
on opening a chocolate box, you were to find it
contained caviar.

Of course by now you know that Myra is the girl

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 197

you used to see smiling out at you from the Inver-
ness & Heath catalogue entitled Sportswomen's
Apparel. The head of her department had soon
discovered that Myra, posing for illustrations to
be used in the spring booklet, raised that pamphlet's
selling power about 100 per cent. Sunburned
misses, with wind-ravaged complexions, gazing at
the picture of Myra, cool, slim, luscious-looking, saw

themselves as they would fain be and bought the

Knollwood sweater depicted — in silk or wool —
putty, maize, navy, rose, copen, or white — $35.
Myra posed in paddock coat and breeches — she who
had never been nearer a horse than the distance
between sidewalk and road. She smiled at you
over her shoulder radiant in a white tricot Palm
Beach suit, who thought palms grew in jardinieres
only. On page 17 she was revealed in the boy-
ish impudence of our Aiken Polo Habit, complete,
$90. She was ravishing in her golf clothes, her
small feet in sturdy, flat-heeled boots planted far
apart, and only the most carping would have com-
mented on the utter impossibility of her stance.
Then there was the Killiecrankie Travel Tog (back-
ground of assorted mountains) made of Scotch
tweed (she would never come nearer Scotland than
oatmeal for breakfast) only $140. To say nothing
of motor clothes, woodland suits, trap-shooting
costumes, Yellowstone Park outfits, hunting habits.

198 GIGOLO

She wore brogues, and boots, and skating shoes,
and puttees and tennis ties ; sou'westers, leather top-
coats, Jersey silks, military capes. You saw her
fishing, hunting, boating, riding, golfing, snow-shoe-
ing, swimming. She was equally lovely in khaki with
woollen stockings, or in a habit of white linen and the
shiniest of riding-boots. And as she peeled off the
one to put on the next she remarked wearily, "A
kimono and felt slippers and my hair down my back
will look pretty good to me to-night, after this."

You see, Myra and Florian really had so much
in common that if he had been honest with himself
the course of their love would have run too smooth
to be true. But Florian, in his effort to register
as a two-fisted, hard-riding, nature-taming male,
made such a success of it that for a long time he
deceived even Myra who loved him. And during
that time she, too, lied in her frantic effort to match
her step with his. When he talked of riding and
swimming ; of long, hard mountain hikes ; of impene-
trable woods, she looked at him with sparkling eyes.
(She didn't need to throw much effort into that, na-
ture having supplied her with the ground materials.)
When, on their rare Sundays together, he suggested
a long tramp up the Palisades she agreed enthusias-
tically, though she hated it. Not only that, she
went, loathing it. The stones hurt her feet. Her
slender ankles ached. The sun burned her delicate

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 199

skin. The wind pierced her thin coat. Florian
strode along with the exaggerated step of the short
man who bitterly resents his lack of stature. Every
now and then he stood still, and breathed deeply,
and said, "Glorious!" And Myra looked at his
straight back, and his clear-cut profile, and his well-
dressed legs and said, "Isn't it !" and wished he would
kiss her. But he never did.

In between times he bemoaned his miserable two
weeks' vacation which made impossible the sort of
thing he said he craved — a long, hard, rough trip
into a mountain interior. The Rockies, preferably,
in their jaggedest portions.

"That's the kind of thing that makes a fellow
over. Roughing it. You forget about the city. In
the saddle all day — nothing but sky and mountains.
God's big open spaces ! That's the life !"

Myra trudged along, painfully. "But isn't it
awfully uncomfortable? You know. Cold? And
tents ? I don't think I'd like "

"I wouldn't give a cent for a person who was so
soft they couldn't stand roughing it a little. That's
the trouble with you Easterners. Soft! No red
blood. Too many street cars, and high buildings,
and restaurants. Chop down a few trees and fry
your own bacon, and make your own camp, and sad-
dle your own horses — that's what I call living. I'm
going back to it some day, see if I don't."

200 GIGOLO

Myra looked down at her own delicate wrists, with
the blue veins so exquisitely etched against the white
flesh. A little look of terror and hopelessness came
into her eyes.

"I — I couldn't chop down a tree," she said. She
was panting a little in keeping up with him, for he
was walking very fast. "I'd be afraid to saddle a
horse. You have to stand right next to them, don't
you? Most girls can't chop "

Florian smiled a little superior smile. "Miss Jessie
Heath can." Myra looked up at him, quickly.
"She's a wonder! She was in yesterday," he went
on. "Spent all of two hours up in my department,
looking things over. There's nothing she can't do.
She won a blue ribbon at the Horse Show in Feb-
ruary. Saddle. She's climbed every peak that
amounts to anything in Europe. Did the Alps
when she was a little girl. This summer she's going
to do the Rockies, because things are so mussed up
in Europe, she says. I'm selecting the outfit for the
party. Gad, what a trip!" He sighed, deeply.

Myra was silent. She was not ungenerous toward
women, as are so many pretty girls. But she was
human, after all, and she did love this Florian, and
Jessie Heath was old man Heath's daughter.
Whenever she came into the store she created a little
furore among the clerks. Myra could not resist a
tiny flash of claws.

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 201

"She's flat, like a man. And she wears 7^-C.
And her face looks as if it had been rubbed with a
scouring brick."

"She's a goddess!" said Florian, striding along.
Myra laughed, a little high hysterical laugh. Then
she bit her lip, and then she was silent for a long
time. He was silent, too, until suddenly he heard
a little sound that made him turn quickly to look
at her stumbling along at his side. And she was
crying.

"Why— what's the matter ! What's ! "

"I'm tired," sobbed Myra, and sank in a little limp
heap on a convenient rock. "I'm tired. I want to
go home."

"Why" — he was plainly bewildered — "why didn't
you tell me you were tired!"

"I'm telling you now."

They took the nearest ferry across the river,
and the Subway home. At the entrance to the noisy,
crowded flat in which she lived Myra turned to face
him. She was through with pretense. She was
tired of make-believe. She felt a certain relief in
the thought of what she had to say. She faced
him squarely.

"I've lived in the city all my life and I'm crazy
about it. I love it. I like to walk in the park a
little maybe, Sundays, but I hate tramping like
we did this afternoon, and you might as well know

202 GIGOLO

it. I wouldn't chop down a tree, not if I was freez-
ing to death, and I'd hate to have to sleep in a tent,
so there! I hate sunburn, and freckles, and ants
in the pie, and blisters on my feet, and getting wet,
and flat-heeled shoes, and I never saddled a horse.
I'd be afraid to. And what's more, I don't believe
you do, either."

"Don't believe I do what?" asked Florian in a
stunned kind of voice.

But Myra had turned and left him. And as he
stood there, aghast, bewildered, resentful, clear and
fair in the back of his mind, against all the turmoil
of thoughts that seethed there, was the picture of her
white, slim, exquisite throat with a little delicate
pulse beating in it as she cried out her rebellion. He
wished — or some one inside him that could not con-
trol wished — that he could put his fingers there on
her throat, gently.

It was very warm that evening, for May. And
as he sat by the window in his pajamas, just before
going to bed, he thought about Myra, and he
thought about himself. But when he thought about
himself he slammed the door on what he saw. Flor-
ian's rooms were in Lexington Avenue in the old
brownstone district that used to be the home of
white-headed millionaires with gold-headed canes,
who, on dying, left their millions to an Alger news-
boy who had once helped them across the street.

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 203

Millionaires, gold-headed canes, and newsboys had
long vanished, and the old brownstone fronts were
rooming houses now, interspersed with delicatessens,
interior decorators, and dressmaking establishments.
Florian was fond of boasting when he came down to
the store in the morning, after a hot, muggy July
night, "My place is like a summer resort. Breeze
just sweeps through it. I have to have the covers
on."

Sometimes Mrs. Pet, his landlady, made him a
pitcher of lemonade and brought it up to him, and
he sipped it, looking out over the city, soothed by
its roar, fascinated by its glow and brilliance. Mrs.
Pet said it was a pleasure to have him around, he
was so neat.

Florian was neat. Not only neat, but methodical.
He had the same breakfast every week-day morning
at Child's; half a grapefruit, one three-minute egg,
coffee, rolls. On Sunday morning he had bacon and
eggs. It was almost automatic. Speaking of auto-
matics, he never took his meals at one of those
modern mechanical feeders. Though at Child's he
never really beheld the waitress with his seeing eye,
he liked to have her slap his dishes down before him
with a genial crash. A gentleman has his little
foibles, and being waited on at meal-time was one
of his. Occasionally, to prove to himself that he
wasn't one of those fogies who get in a rut, he or-

204 GIGOLO

dcred wheat cakes with maple syrup for breakfast.
They always disagreed with him.

She was a wise young woman, Myra.

Perhaps Florian, as he sat by his window that
Sunday night of Myra's outburst, thought on these
things. But he would not admit to himself whither
his thinking led. And presently he turned back
the spread, neatly, and turned out the light, and
opened the window a little wider, and felt of his
chin, as men do, though the next shave is eight
hours distant, and slept, and did not dream
of white throats as he had secretly hoped he
would.

And next morning, at eleven, a very wonderful
thing began to happen. Next morning, at eleven,
Miss Jessie Heath loped (well, it can't be helped.
That describes it exactly) into the broad aisles of
the fifth floor. She had been coming in a great
deal, lately. The Western trip, no doubt.

Descriptions of people are clumsy things, at best,
and stop one's story. But Jessie Heath must have
her paragraph. A half-dozen lines ought to do it.
Well — she was the kind of girl who always goes
around with a couple of Airedales, and in woollen
stockings, low shoes and mannish shirts, and shell-
rimmed glasses, and you felt she wore Ferris waists.
Her hair was that ashen blonde with no glint of
gold in it. You knew it would become grey in

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 205

middle age with no definite period of transition. She
never buttoned her heavy welted gloves but wore
them back over her hand, like a cuff, very English.
You felt there must be a riding crop concealed
about her somewhere. Perhaps up her spine.

As has been said, there was always a little flurry
when she came into the big store that had made mil-
lions for her father. It would be nonsense to sup-
pose that Jessie Heath ever deliberately set out to
attract a man who was an employee in that store.
But it is pleasant and soothing to be admired, and
to have a fine pair of eyes look fine things into one's
own (shell- rimmed) ones. And, after all, the Jessie
Heaths of this world are walked with, and golfed
with, and ridden with, and tennised with, and told
that they're wonderful pals. But it's the Myras
that are made love to. So now, when Florian Sykes
looked at her, and flushed a little, and said, "I sup-
pose there are a lot of lucky ones going along with
you on this trip, Miss — Jessie," she flushed, too,
and flicked her boot with her riding crop — No, no !
I forgot. She didn't have a riding crop. Well,
anyway she gave the effect of flicking her boot with
her riding crop, and said:

"Would you like to go?"

"Would I like to go !" He chocked over it.

Then he sighed, and smiled rather wistfully.
"That's needlessly cruel of you, Miss Jessie."

206 GIGOLO

"Maybe it's not so cruel as you think," Jessie
Heath answered. "Did you make out that list?"

"I spent practically all of yesterday on it."
Which we know was a lie because, look, wasn't he
with Myra?

They went over the list together. Fishing tackle,
tents, pocket-flashes, puttees, ponchos, chocolate,
quirts, slickers, matches, medicine-case, sweaters,
cooking utensils, blankets. It grew longer, and
longer. Their heads came close together over it.
And they trailed from department to department,
laughing and talking together. And the two Maine
ex-guides and the clerk who boasted he knew the
Rockies like the palm of his hand, said to one another,
"Get on to Nature's Rival trying to make a hit with
Jessie."

Meanwhile Jessie was saying, "Of course you
know the Rockies, being a Western man, and
all."

Florian smiled rather deprecatingly. "Queer
part of it is I don't know the Rockies so well —
with an emphasis on the word Rockies that led one
to think his more noteworthy feats of altitude had
been accomplished about the Alps, the Pyrenees, the
Andes, and the lesser Appalachians.

"But you've climbed them, haven't your0'

He burned his bridges behind him. "Only the
— ah — eastern slopes."

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 207

"Oh, that's all right, then. We're going to do
the west. It'll be wonderful having you "

"Me!"

"Nothing. Let's go on with the list. M-m-m —
where were we? Oh, yes. Now trout flies. Which
do you honestly think best for mountain trout?
The Silver Doctor or the Gray Hackle or the Yellow
Professor? U'm?"

Inspiration comes to us at such times. It could
have been nothing less that prompted him to say,
"Well — doesn't that depend a lot on the weather
and the depth of the — ahem ! — water ?"

"Yes, of course. How silly of me. We'll take a
lot of all kinds, and then we'll be safe."

He breathed again and smiled. He had a win-
ning smile, Florian. Jessie Heath smiled in return
and they stood there, the two of them, lips parted,
eyes holding eyes.

"My God !" said the man who boasted he knew
the Rockies like the palm of his own hand, "it looks
as if he'd landed her, the stiff."

Certainly it looked as if he had. For next morn-
ing old Heath, red-faced, genial-looking (and not so
genial as he looked) approached the head of the fifth
floor and said, "How long you been with us, Sykes?"

"Well, I came here as errand boy at thirteen.
That's ten — twelve — fifteen — just about sixteen
years next June. Yes, sir."

208 GIGOLO

"How'd Jessie — how'd my daughter get the idea
you were from the West, and a regular mountain
goat, and a peak-climber and all that?"

He did look a little uncomfortable then, but it
was too late for withdrawal. "I am from the West,
you know."

"Have you had any long vacations since you've
been with us?"

"No, sir. You see, in the summer, of course —
our busy season. I never can get away then. So
I've taken my two weeks in the fall."

Old Heath's eyes narrowed musingly. "Well, you
couldn't have done all this mountain climbing before

you were thirteen. And Jessie says " He

paused, rather blankly. "You say you do know the
Rockies, though, eh?"

Florian drew himself up a little. "As well as I
know any mountain."

"Oh, well, then, that's all right. Seems Jessie
thinks you'd be a fine fellow to have along on this
trip. I can't go myself. I hate this mountain
climbing, anyway. Too darned hard work. But
it's all right for young folks. Well, now, what do
you say ? Want to go ? You've earned a vacation,
after sixteen years. There's about eight in Jessie's
crowd. Not counting guides. What do you say?
Like to go?"

For a dazed moment Florian stared at him.

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 209

"Why, yessir. Yes, sir, I'd — I'd like to go — very
much." And he coughed to hide his joy and
terror.

And two weeks later he went.

The thing swept the store like a flame. In an
hour everyone knew it from the shipping-room to
the roof-restaurant. Myra saw him the day he left.
She was game, that girl.

"I hope you're going to have a beautiful time,
Mr. Sykes."

"Thanks, Myra." He could afford to be lenient
with her, poor little girl.

She ventured a final wretched word or two. "It's
— it's wonderful of Mr. Heath and — Miss Heath —
isn't it ?" She was rubbing salt into her own wound
and taking a fierce sort of joy in it.

"Wonderful ! Say, they're a couple of God's green
footstools, that's what they are!" He was a little
mixed, but very much in earnest. "A couple of
God's green footstools." And he went.

He went, and Myra watched him go, and except
for a little swelling gulp in her white throat you'd
never have known she'd been hit. He was going
with Jessie Heath. Now, Myra had no illusions
about those things. Old man Heath's wife, now
dead, had been a girl with no money and no looks,
and yet he had married her. If Jessie Heath hap-
pened to take a fancy to Florian, why

210 GIGOLO

Myra's little world stood still, and in it were small
voices, far away, asking for G^-B; and have you
it in brown, and other unimportant things like that.

Ten minutes after the train had started Florian
Sykes knew he shouldn't have come. He had sus-
pected it before. He kept saying to himself, over
and over: "You've always wanted a mountain trip,
and now you're going to have it. You're a lucky
guy, that's what you are. A lucky guy." But in
his heart he knew he was lying.

In the first place, they were all so glib with their
altitudes, and their packs, and their trails, and their
horses and their camps. It was a rather mixed
and raggle-taggle group that Miss Jessie Heath
had gathered about her for this expedition to the
West. They ranged all the way from a little fluffy
witless golden-haired girl they all called Mud, for
some obscure reason, and who had been Miss Heath's
room-mate at college, surprisingly enough, to a
lady of stern and rock-bound countenance who
looked like a stage chaperon made up for the part.
She was Miss Heath's companion in lieu of Mrs.
Heath, deceased. In between there were a couple
of men of Florian's age; two youngsters of twenty-
one or two who talked of Harvard and asked Florian
what his university had been; an old girl whose
name Florian never did learn; and two others of
Jessie Heath's age and general style. Florian

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 211

found himself as bewildered by their talk and views
as though they had been jabbering a foreign lan-
guage. Every now and then, though, one of them
would turn to him for a bit of technical advice. If
it happened to concern equipment Florian could
answer it readily enough. Ten years on the fifth
floor had taught him many things. But if the knowl-
edge sought happened to be of things geograph-
ical or of nature, he floundered, struggled, sank.
And it took them just about half a day to learn this.
The trip out takes four, from New York.

At first they asked him things to see him suffer.
But they tired of that, after a bit. It was too easy.
Queerly enough, Jessie Heath, mountain-wise though
she was, believed in him almost to the end. But that
oniy made the next three weeks the bitterer for
Florian Sykes. For when it came to leaping from
peak to peak Jessie turned out to be the young
gazelle. And she liked to have Florian with her.
On the trail she was a mosquito afoot, a jockey
ahorseback. A thousand times, in those three weeks
of torture, he would fix his eye on a tree ten feet
away, up the steep trail. And to himself he would
say, "I'll struggle, somehow, as far as that tree,
and then die under it." And he would stagger an-
other ten feet, his heart pounding in the unaccus-
tomed altitude, his lungs bursting, his lips parted,
his breath coming sobbingly, his eyes starting from

212 GIGOLO

his head. Leaping lightly ahead of him, around
the bend, was Jessie, always. She had a way of
calling to the laggard — hallooing, I believe it's sup-
posed to be. And she expected an answer. An
answer! When your lungs were bursting through
your chest and your heart was crowding your ton-
sils. When he reached her it was always to find
her perched on a seemingly inaccessible rock, de-
manding that he join her to admire the view.
Before three days had gone by the sound of that
halloo with its breeziness and breath-control and
power, made him sick all over. Sometimes she sang,
going up the trail. He could not have croaked a
note if failure to do it had meant instant death.
The Harvard hellions (it is his own term) were in-
defatigable, simian, pitiless. At nine thousand feet
they aimed at ten. At ten they would have nothing
less than twelve. At twelve thousand they were all
for making another drive for it and having lunch at
an altitude of thirteen thousand five hundred. As he
toiled painfully along hundreds of feet behind them,
Florian used to take a hideous pleasure in fancying
how, on reaching the ever-distant top, the Harvard
hellions would be missing. And after searching and
hallooing he would peer over the edge (13,500 feet, at
the very least, surely) and there, at the bottom,
would discern their mangled forms, distorted,
crushed, and quite, quite dead.

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 213

"Yoo-o-o — hoo-oo-oo-oo !" Jessie, up the trail.
His rosy dream would vanish.

He learned why seasoned mountain climbers make
nothing of the ascent. He learned, in bitterness and
unshed tears, that it is the descent that breaks the
heart and shatters the already broken frame. That
down-climb with your toes crashing through your
boots at every step; with your knee-brakes refusing
to work, your thighs creaking, your joints spavined.
The views were wonderful. But, oh, the price he
paid! The air was intoxicating. But what, he
asked himself, was wine to a dead man! Miserable
little cockney that he was he told himself a hundred
times a day that if he ever survived this he'd never
look at another view again, unless from the Wool-
worth Tower, on a calm day. He thought of New
York as a traveller, dying of thirst in the desert,
thinks of the lush green oasis. New York in July!
Dear New York in July, its furs in storage, its
collar unstarched, its coat unbuttoned; even its
doormen and chauffeurs almost human. Would he
ever see it again? And then, as if in answer to his
question, there befell an incident so harrowing, so
nerve-shattering, as almost to make a negative an-
swer seem inevitable.

Florian got lost.

It was the third week of the trip. Florian had
answered Jessie's eleven thousandth question about

214 GIGOLO

things of which he was quite, quite ignorant. His
brain felt queer and tight, as though something
were about to snap.

They were to climb the Peak next day. All that
day they had been approaching it. Florian looked
at it. And he hated it. It was like a colossal for-
bidding finger pointing upward, upward, taunting
him, menacing him. He wished that some huge
cataclysm of nature would occur, swallowing up this
hideous mass of pitiless rock.

Jessie Heath's none too classic nose had peeled
long ere this and her neck was like a choice cut of
underdone beefsteak. Florian told himself that there
was something almost indecent about a girl who
cared so little about her skin, and hair, and eyes,
and hands. He actually hated her sturdy legs in
their boots or puttees — those tireless, pitiless legs,
always twinkling ahead of him, up the trail.

On the fateful day he was tired. He had often
been tired to the point of desperation during the
past three weeks. But this was different. Every
step was torture. Every breath was pain. Jessie
was a few hundred feet up the trail, as always, and
hallooing to him every dozen paces. The Harvard
hellions were doing the chamois ahead of her. The
rest of the party were toiling along behind. One
guide was just ahead. Another, leading two horses,
bringing up the rear. Suddenly, desperately, Flor-

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 215

ian knew he must rest. He would fling himself on
a bed of moss by the side of the trail, in the shade,
near a stunted, wind-tortured timber-line pine, and
let the whole procession pass him, and then catch up
with them before they disappeared.

He stepped to the side of the narrow trail, almost
indiscernible at this height, flung himself down with
a little groan of relief, and shut his sun-seared eyes.
The voices of the others came to him. There was
little conversation. He heard Jessie's accursed
halloo. Then the soft thud of the pack-horses'
hoofs, the creak of the saddles. He must get up
and follow now. In a minute. In a minute. In

He must have slept there for two hours. When
he awoke the light had changed and the air was chill.
He sat up, bewildered. He rose. He looked about,
called, hallooed, shouted, did all the futile frenzied
things that a city man does who is lost in the
mountains, and, knowing he is lost, is panic-stricken.
The trail, of course! He looked for it, and there
was no trail, to his town-wise eyes. He ran hither
and thither, and back to hither again. He went for-
ward, seemingly, and found himself back whence he
started. He looked for cairns, for tree-blazes, for
any one of the signs of which he had learned in the
last three weeks. He found none. He called again,
shrilly. A terror seized him. Terror of those grim,

216 GIGOLO

menacing, towering mountain masses. He ran
round and round and round; darted backward and
forward ; called ; stumbled ; fell, and subsided, beaten.

He had a tiny box of matches with him, but little
else. He had found the trail difficult enough with-
out being pack-burdened. Food? He bethought
himself of a little blue tin box in his coat pocket.
He took it out and looked at it. Its very name
struck terror to his heart.

U. S. Emergency Ration. It was printed on the
box. Just below that he made out :

Powdered sugar

Chocolate

Cocoa butter

Malted milk

Egg Albumin

Casein.

Not to be opened except on command of officer.

My God! He had come to this! He looked at
it, wide-eyed. He was very hungry. The ration,
in its blue tin, like a box of shaving talcum, had been
handed to each of the party in a chorus of shouting
and laughter. And now it was to save his life.
He managed to pry open the box, and ate some of
its contents, slowly. It was not agreeable.

Dusk was coming on. There were mountain lions,
he knew that. Those rocks and crevices were peo-
pled with all sorts of stealthy, snarling, slinking,

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 217

four-footed creatures. He would build a fire. They
were afraid of the flames, he had read somewhere,
and would not come near. Perhaps the others would
see the light, and come back to find him. Curse
them ! Why hadn't they come before now !

It was dusk by the time he had his fire built. He
had crouched over it for a half-hour, blowing it,
coaxing it, wheedling it. There were few twigs or
sticks at this height. He was very cold. His heavy
sweater was in the pack on the horse's back. Finally
he was rewarded with a feeble flicker, a tiny tongue
of flame. He rose from his knees and passed his
hand over his forehead with a gesture of utter weari-
ness and despair. And then he stared, transfixed.
For on the plateau above him rose a great shaft of
fire. The kind of fire that only Pete, the most ex-
pert among guides, could build. And as he stared
there burst out at him from behind trees, rocks,
crevices, a whole horde of imps shrieking with fiendish
laughter.

"Ho, ho," laughed Jessie.

And "Ha, ha !" howled the Harvard hellions.

"Thought you were lost, didn'tcha ?"

"Gosh, you looked funny!"

"Your face! "

Florian stared at them. He did not smile. He
went quietly over to his tiny camp-fire and stamped
it out, neatly, as he had been taught to do. He

218 GIGOLO

took his can of emergency ration (not to be opened
except on command of officer) and hurled it far, far
down the mountainside. Jessie Heath laughed, con-
temptuously. And Florian, looking at her, didn't
care. Didn't care. Didn't care.

The nightmare was over in August. Over, that
is, for Florian. The rest were to do another four
weeks of it, farther into the interior. Florian sick-
ened at the thought of it. When he bade them fare-
well he was so glad to be free of them that he almost
loved them. When he found himself actually on the
little jerkwater train that was to connect him with
the main line he patted the dusty red plush seat,
gratefully, as one would stroke a faithful beast.
When he came into the Grand Central station he
would have stooped and kissed the steps of the
marble staircase if his porter had not been on the
point of vanishing with his bags. That night on
reaching home he stayed in the bathtub for an hour,
just lying there in the warm, soothing liquid, only
moving to dapple his fingers now and then as a lazy
fish moves a languid fin. God's country! This
was it.

"My, it's nice to have you back again, Mr.
Sykes," said Mrs. Pet.

"Is your big two-room suite on the next floor
vacant?" said Florian, cryptically.

Mrs. Pet stared a little, wonderingly. "Yes,

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 219

that's vacant since the Ostranders left, in July.
Why do you ask, Mr. Sykes?"

"Nothing," Florian answered, airily. "Not a
thing. Just asked."

His train had come in at nine. It was eleven now,
but he was restless, and a little hungry, and very
much exhilarated. "You certainly look grand,"
Mrs. Pet had exclaimed, admiringly. "And my,
how you're sunburned!"

He left the Lexington Avenue house, now, and
strolled over to the near-by white-tiled restaurant.
There, in the window, was the white-capped one,
flapping pancakes. Florian could have kissed him.
He sat down. A waitress approached him.

"I don't know," mused Florian. "I'm sort of
hungry, but I don't just "

"The pork and beans are elegant to-night," sug-
gested the girl.

And "Pork and beans ! NO !" thundered Florian.

The girl drew herself up icily. "I ain't deef.
You don't need to yell."

Florian looked up at her contritely, and smiled
his winning smile. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean — I
— I never want to see beans again as long as I
live!"

He was down at the store early, early next morn-
ing. His practised eye swept the department for
possible slackness, for changes, for needed adjust-

220 GIGOLO

ments. The two Maine ex-guides and the chap who
knew the Rockies like the palm of his hand wel-
comed him with Judas-like slaps on the shoulder.
"Like it?" they asked him. And, "God's country —
the West," he answered, mechanically. After that
he ignored them. At nine he ran down the two
flights of stairs to the third floor. He did not wait
for the elevator.

For a moment he could not find her and his heart
sank. She might be away on a vacation. Then
he spied her in a corner half-hidden by a rack of
covert coats. She was hanging them up. The floor
was empty of customers thus early. He strode over
to her. She turned. Into her eyes there leaped a
look which she quickly veiled as had been taught her
by a thousand thousand female ancestors.

"I got your postals," she said.

Florian said nothing.

"My, you're brown!"

Florian said nothing.

"Did you — have a good time?"

Florian said nothing.

"What — what " Her hand went to her

throat, where his eyes were fastened.

Then Florian spoke. "How white your throat
is !" he said. "How white your throat is !"

Myra stepped out, then, from among the covert
coats on the rack. Her head was lifted high on the

AIN'T NATURE WONDERFUL! 221

creamy column that supported it. She had her
pride, had Myra.

"It's no whiter than it was a month ago, that I
can see."

"I know it." His tone was humble, with a little
pleading note in it. "I know a lot of things that I
didn't know a month ago, Myra."

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES

HANNAH WINTER was sixty all of a sud-
den, as women of sixty are. Just yester-
day— or the day before, at most — she had
been a bride of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wed-
ding gown, very stiff and rich. And now here she
was, all of a sudden, sixty.

The actual anniversary that marked her three-
score had had nothing to do with it. She had
passed that day painlessly enough — happily, in fact.
But now, here she was, all of a sudden, consciously,
bewilderingly, sixty. This is the way it happened!

She was rushing along Peacock Alley to meet her
daughter Marcia. Any one who knows Chicago
knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress
Hotel; and any one who knows the Congress Hotel
has walked down that glittering white marble crypt
called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering
nor so white, nor, for that matter, so prone to preen
itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s. But it
still serves as a convenient short cut on a day when
Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a

222

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 223

hazard, and thus Hannah Winter was using it.
She was to have met Marcia at the Michigan Boule-
vard entrance at two, sharp. And here it was 2.07.
When Marcia said two, there she was at two, waiting,
lips slightly compressed. When you came clatter-
ing up, breathless, at 2.07, she said nothing in re-
proach. But within the following half hour bits
of her conversation, if pieced together, would have
summed up something like this :

"I had to get the children off in time and give
them their lunch first because it's wash day and
Lutie's busy with the woman and won't do a single
extra thing ; and all my marketing for to-day and to-
morrow because to-morrow's Memorial Day and they
close at noon ; and stop at the real estate agent's on
Fifty-third to see them about the wall paper before
I came down. I didn't even have time to swallow a
cup of tea. And yet I was here at two. You
haven't a thing to do. Not a blessed thing, living
at a hotel. It does seem to me. . . ."

So then here it was 2.07, and Hannah Winter,
rather panicky, was rushing along Peacock Alley,
dodging loungers, and bell-boys, and travelling
salesmen and visiting provincials and the inevitable
red-faced delegates with satin badges. In her hurry
and nervous apprehension she looked, as she scut-
tled down the narrow passage, very much like the
Rabbit who was late for the Duchess's dinner. Her

224 GIGOLO

rubber-heeled oxfords were pounding down hard on
the white marble pavement. Suddenly she saw
coming swiftly toward her a woman who seemed
strangely familiar — a well-dressed woman, harassed
looking, a tense frown between her eyes, and her
eyes staring so that they protruded a little, as one
who runs ahead of herself in her haste. Hannah
had just time to note, in a flash, that the woman's
smart hat was slightly askew and that, though she
walked very fast, her trim ankles showed the
inflexibility of age, when she saw that the wo-
man was not going to get out of her way.
Hannah Winter swerved quickly to avoid a collision.
So did the other woman. Next instant Hannah
Winter brought up with a crash against her own
image in that long and tricky mirror which forms
a broad full-length panel set in the marble wall at
the north end of Peacock Alley. Passersby and the
loungers on near-by red plush seats came running,
but she was unhurt except for a forehead bump that
remained black-and-blue for two weeks or more.
The bump did not bother her, nor did the slightly
amused concern of those who had come to her assist-
ance. She stood there, her hat still askew, staring
at this woman — this woman with her stiff ankles, her
slightly protruding eyes, her nervous frown, her hat
a little sideways — this stranger — this murderess
who had just slain, ruthlessly and forever, a sallow,

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 225

lively, high-spirited girl of twenty in a wine-coloured
silk wedding gown.

Don't think that Hannah Winter, at sixty, had
tried to ape sixteen. She was not one of those grisly
sexagenarians who think that, by wearing pink, they
can combat the ochre of age. Not at all. In dress,
conduct, mode of living she was as an intelligent
and modern woman of sixty should be. The youth
of her was in that intangible thing called, sentiment-
ally, the spirit. It had survived forty years of
tmffeting, and disappointment, and sacrifice and
hard work. Inside this woman who wore well-
tailored black and small close hats and clean white
wash gloves (even in Chicago) was the girl, Hannah
Winter, still curious about this adventure known
as living; still capable of bearing its disappoint-
ments or enjoying its surprises. Still capable, even,
of being surprised. And all this is often the case,
all unsuspected by the Marcias until the Marcias
are, themselves, suddenly sixty. When it is too
late to say to the Hannah Winters, "Now I
understand."

We know that Hannah Winter had been married
in wine-coloured silk, very stiff and grand. So stiff
and rich that the dress would have stood alone if
Hannah had ever thought of subjecting her wedding
gown to such indignity. It was the sort of silk of
which it is said that they don't make such silk now.

226 GIGOLO

It was cut square at the neck and trimmed with
passementerie and fringe brought crosswise from
breast to skirt hem. It's in the old photograph and,
curiously enough, while Marcia thinks it's comic,
Joan, her nine-year-old daughter, agrees with her
grandmother in thinking it very lovely. And so,
in its quaintness and stiffness and bravery, it is.
Only you've got to have imagination.

While wine-coloured silk wouldn't have done for
a church wedding it was quite all right at home ; and
Hannah Winter's had been a home wedding (the
Winters lived in one of the old three-story red-bricks
that may still be seen, in crumbling desuetude, over
on Rush Street) so that wine-coloured silk for a
twenty-year-old bride was quite in the mode.

It is misleading, perhaps, to go on calling her
Hannah Winter, for she married Hermie Slocum and
became, according to law, Mrs. Hermie Slocum, but
remained, somehow, Hannah Winter in spite of law
and clergy, though with no such intent on her part.
She had never even heard of Lucy Stone. It wasn't
merely that her Chicago girlhood friends still spoke
of her as Hannah Winter. Hannah Winter suited
her — belonged to her and was characteristic. Mrs.
Hermie Slocum sort of melted and ran down off her.
Hermie was the sort of man who, christened Herman,
is called Hermie. That all those who had known
her before her marriage still spoke of her as Hannah

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 227

Winter forty years later was merely another tri-
umph of the strong over the weak.

At twenty Hannah Winter had been a rather
sallow, lively, fun-loving girl, not pretty, but ani-
mated ; and forceful, even then. The Winters were
middle-class, respected, moderately well-to-do Chi-
cago citizens — or had been moderately well-to-do
before the fire of '71. Horace Winter had been
caught in the financial funk that followed this
disaster and the Rush Street household, almost ten
years later, was rather put to it to supply the wine-
coloured silk and the supplementary gowns, linens,
and bedding. In those days you married at twenty
if a decent chance to marry at twenty presented
itself. And Hermie Slocum seemed a decent chance,
undoubtedly. A middle-class, respected, moderately
well-to-do-person himself, Hermie, with ten thousand
dollars saved at thirty-five and just about to invest
it in business in the thriving city of Indianapolis.
A solid young man, Horace Winter said. Not much
given to talk. That indicated depth and thinking.
Thrifty and far-sighted, as witness the good ten
thousand in cash. Kind. Old enough, with his ad-
ditional fifteen years, to balance the lively Hannah
who was considered rather flighty and too prone
to find fun in things that others considered serious.
A good thing she never quite lost that fault.
Hannah resolutely and dutifully put out of her head

228 GIGOLO

(or nearly) all vagrant thoughts of Clint Darrow
with the crisp black hair and the surprising blue eyes
thereto, and the hat worn rakishly a little on one
side, and the slender cane and the pointed shoes. A
whipper-snapper, according to Horace Winter.
Not a solid business man like Hermie Slocum.
Hannah did not look upon herself as a human
sacrifice. She was genuinely fond of Hermie. She
was fond of her father, too ; the rather harassed and
hen-pecked Horace Winter; and of her mother, the
voluble and quick-tongued and generous Bertha
Winter, who was so often to be seen going down
the street, shawl and bonnet-strings flying, when she
should have been at home minding her household.
Much of the minding had fallen to Hannah.

And so they were married, and went to the thriv-
ing city of Indianapolis to live, and Hannah Winter
was so busy with her new household goods, and the
linens, and the wine-coloured silk and its less mag-
nificent satellites, that it was almost a fortnight be-
fore she realized fully that this solid young man,
Hermie Slocum, was not only solid but immovable;
not merely thrifty, but stingy; not alone taciturn
but quite conversationless. His silences had not
proceeded from the unplumbed depths of his knowl-
edge. He merely had nothing to say. She learned,
too, that the ten thousand dollars, soon dispelled,
had been made for him by an energetic and shrewd

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 229

business partner with whom he had quarrelled and
from whom he had separated a few months before.

There never was another lump sum of ten thou-
sand of Hermie Slocum's earning.

Well. Forty years ago, having made the worst
of it you made the best of it. No going home to
mother. The word "incompatibility" had not come
into wide-spread use. Incompatibility was a thing
to hide, not to flaunt. The years that followed were
dramatic or commonplace, depending on one's sense
of values. Certainly those years were like the mar-
ried years . of many another young woman of that
unplastic day. Hannah Winter had her job cut
out for her and she finished it well, and alone. No
reproaches. Little complaint. Criticism she made
in plenty, being the daughter of a voluble mother;
and she never gave up hope of stiffening the spine
of the invertebrate Hermie.

The ten thousand went in driblets. There never
was anything dashing or romantic about Hermie
Slocum's failures. The household never felt actual
want, nor anything so picturesque as poverty.
Hannah saw to that.

You should have read her letters back home to
Chicago — to her mother and father back home on
Rush Street, in Chicago ; and to her girlhood friends,
Sarah Clapp, Vinie Harden, and Julia Pierce. They
were letters that, for stiff-lipped pride and brazen

230 GIGOLO

boasting, were of a piece with those written by Sen-
timental Tommy's mother when things were going
worst with her.

"My wine-coloured silk is almost worn out," she
wrote. "I'm thinking of making it over into a tea-
gown with one of those new cream pongee panels
down the front. Hermie says he's tired of seeing
me in it, evenings. He wants me to get a blue but
I tell him I'm too black for blue. Aren't men stupid
about clothes ! Though I pretend to Hermie that I
think his taste is excellent, even when he brings me
home one of those expensive beaded mantles I
detest."

Bald, bare-faced, brave lying.

The two children arrived with mathematical
promptness — first Horace, named after his grand-
father Winter, of course ; then Martha, named after
no one in particular, but so called because Hermie
Slocum insisted, stubbornly, that Martha was a
good name for a girl. Martha herself fixed all that
by the simple process of signing herself Marcia in
her twelfth year and forever after. Marcia was a
throw-back to her grandmother Winter — quick-
tongued, restless, volatile. The boy was an admir-
able mixture of the best qualities of his father and
mother; slow-going, like Hermie Slocum, but arriv-
ing surely at his goal, like his mother. With some-
thing of her driving force mixed with anything his

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 231

father had of gentleness. A fine boy, and uninter-
esting. It was Hannah Winter's boast that Horace
never caused her a moment's sorrow or uneasiness in
all his life; and so Marcia, the troublous, was
naturally her pride and idol.

As Hermie's business slid gently downhill Hannah
tried with all her strength to stop it. She had a
shrewd latent business sense and this she vainly
tried to instil in her husband. The children, stir-
ring in their sleep in the bedroom adjoining that of
their parents, would realize, vaguely, that she was
urging him to try something to which he was op-
posed. They would grunt and whimper a little, and
perhaps remonstrate sleepily at being thus dis-
turbed, and then drop off to sleep again to the sound
of her desperate murmurs. For she was desperate.
She was resolved not to go to her people for help.
And it seemed inevitable if Hermie did not heed her.
She saw that he was unsuited for business of the mer-
cantile sort; urged him to take up the selling of in-
surance, just then getting such a strong and wide
hold on the country.

In the end he did take it up, and would have
made a failure of that, too, if it had not been for
Hannah. It was Hannah who made friends for him,
sought out prospective clients for him, led social
conversation into business channels whenever chance
presented itself. She had the boy and girl to think

232 GIGOLO

of and plan for. When Hermie objected to this or
that luxury for them as being stuff and nonsense
Hannah would say, not without a touch of bitter-
ness, "I want them to have every advantage I can
give them. I want them to have all the advantages
I never had when I was young."

"They'll never thank you for it."

"I don't want them to."

Adam and Eve doubtless had the same argument
about the bringing up of Cain and Abel. And Adam
probably said, after Cain's shocking crime, "Well,
what did I tell you! Was I right or was I wrong?
Who spoiled him in the first place!"

They had been married seventeen years when
Hermie Slocum, fifty-two, died of pneumonia follow-
ing a heavy cold. The thirty-seven-year-old widow
was horrified (but not much surprised) to find that
the insurance solicitor had allowed two of his own
policies to lapse. The company was kind, but
businesslike. The insurance amounted, in all, to
about nine thousand dollars. Trust Hermie for
never quite equalling that ten again.

They offered her the agency left vacant by her
husband, after her first two intelligent talks with
them.

"No," she said, "not here. I'm going back to
Chicago to sell insurance. Everybody knows me
there. My father was an old settler in Chicago.

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 233

There'll be my friends, and their husbands, and their
sons. Besides, the children will have advantages
there. I'm going back to Chicago."

She went. Horace and Bertha Winter had died
five years before, within less than a year of each
other. The old Rush Street house had been sold.
The neighbourhood was falling into decay. The
widow and her two children took a little flat on the
south side. Widowed, one might with equanimity
admit stress of circumstance. It was only when one
had a husband that it was disgraceful to show him
to the world as a bad provider.

"I suppose we lived too well," Hannah said when
her old friends expressed concern at her plight.
"Hermie was too generous. But I don't mind work-
ing. It keeps me young."

And so, truly, it did. She sold not only insurance
but coal, a thing which rather shocked her south side
friends. She took orders for tons of this and tons
of that, making a neat commission thereby. She had
a desk in the office of a big insurance company on
Dearborn, near Monroe, and there you saw her
every morning at ten in her neat sailor hat and her
neat tailored suit. Four hours of work lay behind
that ten o'clock appearance. The children were off
to school a little after eight. But there was the
ordering to do ; cleaning ; sewing ; preserving, mend-
ing. A woman came in for a few hours every day

234 GIGOLO

but there was no room for a resident helper. At
night there were a hundred tasks. She helped the
boy and girl with their home lessons, as well, being
naturally quick at mathematics. The boy Horace
had early expressed the wish to be an engineer and
Hannah contemplated sending him to the University
of Wisconsin because she had heard that there the
engineering courses were particularly fine. Not only
that, she actually sent him.

Marcia showed no special talent. She was quick,
clever, pretty, and usually more deeply engaged in
some school-girl love affair than Hannah Winter
approved. She would be an early bride, one could
see that. No career for Marcia, though she sketched
rather well, sewed cleverly, played the piano a little,
sang just a bit, could trim a hat or turn a dress,
danced the steps of the day. She could even cook a
commendable dinner. Hannah saw to that. She saw
to it, as well, that the boy and the girl went to the
theatre occasionally; heard a concert at rare inter-
vals. There was little money for luxuries. Some-
times Marcia said, thoughtlessly, "Mother, why do
you wear those stiff plain things all the time?''

Hannah, who had her own notion of humour,
would reply, "The better to clothe you, my
dear."

Her girlhood friends she saw seldom. Two of
them had married. One was a spinster of forty.

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 235

They had all moved to the south side during the
period of popularity briefly enjoyed by that section
in the late '90s. Hannah had no time for their
afternoon affairs. At night she was too tired or too
busy for outside diversions. When they met her
they said, "Hannah Winter, you don't grow a day
older. How do you do it!"

"Hard work."

"A person never sees you. Why don't you take an
afternoon off some time? Or come in some evening?
Henry was saying only yesterday that he enjoyed
his talk with you so much, and that you were smarter
than any man insurance agent. He said you sold
him I don't know how many thousand dollars' worth
before he knew it. Now I suppose I'll have to go
without a new fur coat this winter."

Hannah smiled agreeably. "Well, Julia, it's
better for you to do without a new fur coat this
winter than for me to do without any."

The Clint Darrow of her girlhood dreams, grown
rather paunchy and mottled now, and with the curl-
ing black hair but a sparse grizzled fringe, had be-
lied Horace Winter's contemptuous opinion. He
was a moneyed man now, with an extravagant wife,
but no children. Hannah underwrote him for a
handsome sum, received his heavy compliments with
a deft detachment, heard his complaints about his
extravagant wife with a sympathetic expression, but

236 GIGOLO

no comment — and that night spent the ten minutes
before she dropped off to sleep in pondering the
impenetrable mysteries of the institution called
marriage. She had married the solid Hermie, and he
had turned out to be quicksand. She had not mar-
ried the whipper-snapper Clint, and now he was one
of the rich city's rich men. Had she married him
against her parents' wishes would Clint Darrow now
be complaining of her extravagance, perhaps, to
some woman he had known in his youth? She
laughed a little, to herself, there in the dark.

"What in the world are you giggling about,
Mother?" called Marcia, who slept in the bedroom
near by. Hannah occupied the davenport couch in
the sitting room. There had been some argument
about that. But Hannah had said she preferred
it; and the boy and girl finally ceased to object.
Horace in the back bedroom, Marcia in the front
bedroom, Hannah in the sitting room. She made
many mistakes like that. So, then, "What in the
world are you giggling about, Mother?"

"Only a game," answered Hannah, "that some
people were playing to-day."

"A new game?"

"Oh, my, no!" said Hannah, and laughed again.
"It's old as the world."

Hannah was forty-seven when Marcia married.
Marcia married well. Not brilliantly, of course, but

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 237

well. Edward was with the firm of Gaige & Hoe,
Importers. He had stock in the company and an
excellent salary, with prospects. With Horace away
at the engineering school Hannah's achievement of
Marcia's trousseau was an almost superhuman feat.
But it was a trousseau complete. As they selected
the monogrammed linens, the hand-made lingerie, the
satin-covered down quilts, the smart frocks, Hannah
thought, quite without bitterness, of the wine-col-
oured silk. Marcia was married in white. She was
blonde, with a fine fair skin, in her father's likeness,
and she made a picture-book bride. She and Ed took
a nice little six-room apartment on Hyde Park
Boulevard, near the Park and the lake. There was
some talk of Hannah's coming to live with them but
she soon put that right.

"No," she had said, at once. "None of that. No
flat was ever built that was big enough for two
families."

"But you're not a family, Mother. You're us."

Hannah, though, was wiser than that.

She went up to Madison for Horace's commence-
ment. He was very proud of his youthful looking,
well-dressed, intelligent mother. He introduced her,
with pride, to the fellows. But there was more than
pride in his tone when he brought up Louise.
Hannah knew then, at once. Horace had said that
he would start to pay back his mother for his

238 GIGOLO

university training with the money earned from his
very first job. But now he and Hannah had a talk.
Hannah hid her own pangs — quite natural pangs of
jealousy and something very like resentment.

"There aren't many Louises," said Hannah.
"And waiting doesn't do, somehow. You're an early
marryer, Horace. The steady, dependable kind.
I'd be a pretty poor sort of mother, wouldn't I,
if " etc.

Horace's first job took him out to South America.
He was jubilant, excited, remorseful, eager, down-
cast, all at once. He and Louise were married a
month before the time set for leaving and she went
with him. It was a job for a young and hardy
and adventurous. On the day they left, Hannah
felt, for the first time in her life, bereaved, widowed,
cheated.

There followed, then, ten years of hard work and
rigid economy. She lived in good boarding houses,
and hated them. She hated them so much that,
toward the end, she failed even to find amusement in
the inevitable wall pictures of phimp, partially
draped ladies lounging on couches and being tickled
in their sleep by overfed cupids in mid-air. She
saved and scrimped with an eye to the time when
she would no longer work. She made some shrewd
and well-advised investments. At the end of these
ten years she found herself possessed of a consider-

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 239

able sura whose investment brought her a sufficient
income, with careful management.

Life had tricked Hannah Winter, but it had not
beaten her. And there, commonplace or dramatic,
depending on one's viewpoint, you have the first
sixty years of Hannah Winter's existence.

This is the curious thing about them. Though
heavy, these years had flown. The working, the
planning, the hoping, had sped them by, somehow.
True, things that never used to tire her tired her
now, and she acknowledged it. She was older, of
course. But she never thought of herself as old.
Perhaps she did not allow herself to think thus. She
had married, brought children into the world, made
their future sure — or as sure as is humanly possible.
And yet she never said, "My work is done. My life
is over." About the future she was still as eager as
a girl. She was a grandmother. Marcia and Ed
had two children, Joan, nine, and Peter, seven
(strong simple names were the mode just then).

Perhaps you know that hotel on the lake front
built during the World's Fair days? A roomy,
rambling, smoke-blackened, comfortable old struc-
ture, ringed with verandas, its shabby fa£ade shab-
bier by contrast with the beds of tulips or geraniums
or canna that jewel its lawn. There Hannah Winter
went to live. It was within five minutes' walk of
Marcia's apartment. Rather expensive, but as

240 GIGOLO

homelike as a hotel could be and housing many old-
time Chicago friends.

She had one room, rather small, with a bit of the
lake to be seen from one window. The grim, old-
fashioned hotel furniture she lightened and supple-
mented with some of her own things. There was a
day bed — a narrow and spindling affair for a
woman of her height and comfortable plumpness. In
the daytime this couch was decked out with taffeta
pillows in rose and blue, with silk fruit and flowers
on them, and gold braid. There were two silk-shaded
lamps, a shelf of books, the photographs of the chil-
dren in flat silver frames, a leather writing set on the
desk, curtains of pale tan English casement cloth at
the windows. A cheerful enough little room.

There were many elderly widows like herself living
in the hotel on slender, but sufficient, incomes. They
were well-dressed women in trim suits or crepes, and
Field's special walking oxfords ; and small smart
hats. They did a little cooking in their rooms — not
much, they hastened to tell you. Their breakfasts
only — a cup of coffee and a roll or a slice of toast,
done on a little electric grill, the coffee above, the
toast below. The hotel dining room was almost free
of women in the morning. There were only the men,
intent on their papers, and their eggs and the 8.40
I. C. train. It was like a men's club, except, perhaps,
for an occasional business woman successful enough

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 241

or indolent enough to do away with the cooking of
the surreptitious matutinal egg in her own room.
Sometimes, if they were to lunch at home, they
carried in a bit of cold ham, or cheese, rolls, butter,
or small dry groceries concealed in muffs or hand-
bags. They even had diminutive iceboxes in closets.
The hotel, perforce, shut its eyes to this sort of
thing. Even permitted the distribution of tiny cubes
of ice by the hotel porter. It was a harmless kind
of cheating. Their good dinners they ate in the
hotel dining room when not invited to dine with
married sons or daughters or friends.

At ten or eleven in the morning you saw them issue
forth, or you saw "little" manicures going in. One
spoke of these as "little" not because of their size,
which was normal, but in definition of their prices.
There were "little" dressmakers as well, and "little"
tailors. In special session they confided to one an-
other the names or addresses of any of these who
happened to be especially deft, or cheap, or modish.

"I've found a little tailor over on Fifty-fifth. I
don't want you to tell any one else about him. He's
wonderful. He's making me a suit that looks ex-
actly like the model Hexter's got this year and guess
what he's charging!" The guess was, of course, al-
ways a triumph for the discoverer of the little
tailor.

The great lake dimpled or roared not twenty feet

242 GIGOLO

away. The park offered shade and quiet. The
broad veranda invited one with its ample armchairs.
You would have thought that peace and comfort had
come at last to this shrewd, knowledgeous, hard-
worked woman of sixty. She was handsomer than
she had been at twenty or thirty. The white powder-
ing her black hair softened her face, lightened her
sallow skin, gave a finer lustre to her dark eyes. She
used a good powder and had an occasional facial
massage. Her figure, though full, was erect, firm,
neat. Around her throat she wore an inch-wide band
of black velvet that becomingly hid the chords and
sagging chin muscles.

Yet now, if ever in her life, Hannah Winter was
a slave.

Every morning at eight o'clock Marcia telephoned
her mother. The hotel calls cost ten cents, but
Marcia's was an unlimited phone. The conver-
sation would start with a formula.

"Hello — Mama? . . . How are you?"

"Fine."

"Sleep all right?"

"Oh, yes. I never sleep all night through any
more."

"Oh, you probably just think you don't.
Are you doing anything special this morning?"

"Well, I— - Why?"

"Nothing. I just wondered if you'd mind taking

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 243

Joan to the dentist's. Her brace came off again
this morning at breakfast. I don't see how I can
take her because Elsie's giving that luncheon at one,
you know, and the man's coming about upholstering
that big chair at ten. I'd call up and try to
get out of the luncheon, but I've promised, and there's
bridge afterward and it's too late now for Elsie
to get a fourth. Besides, I did that to her once be-
fore and she was furious. Of course, if you
can't . . . But I thought if you haven't any-
thing to do, really, why "

Through Hannah Winter's mind would flash the
events of the day as she had planned it. She had
meant to go downtown shopping that morning.
Nothing special. Some business at the bank.
Mandel's had advertised a sale of foulards. She
hated foulards with their ugly sprawling pat-
terns. A nice, elderly sort of material. Marcia
was always urging her to get one. Hannah knew
she never would. She liked the shops in their
spring vividness. She had a shrewd eye for a
bargain. A bite of lunch somewhere; then she had
planned to drop in at that lecture at the Woman's
Club. It was by the man who wrote "Your
Town." He was said to be very lively and in-
sulting. She would be home by five, running in to
see the children for a minute before going to her
hotel to rest before dinner.

244 GIGOLO

A selfish day, perhaps. But forty years of un-
selfish ones had paid for it. Well. Shopping
with nine-year-old Joan was out of the question.
So, too, was the lecture. After the dentist had
mended the brace Joan would have to be brought
home for her lunch. Peter would be there, too.
It was Easter vacation time. Hannah probably
would lunch with them, in Marcia's absence, nag-
ging them a little about their spinach and chop
and apple sauce. She hated to see the two chil-
dren at table alone, though Marcia said that was
nonsense.

Hannah and Marcia differed about a lot of
things. Hannah had fallen into the bad habit of
saying, "When you were children I didn't n

"Yes, but things are different now, please re-
member, Mother. I want my children to have all
the advantages I can give them. I want them to
have all the advantages I never had."

If Ed was present at such times he would look
up from his paper to say, "The kids '11 never thank
you for it, Marsh."

"I don't want them to."

There was something strangely familiar about
the whole thing as it sounded in Hannah's ears.

The matter of the brace, alone. There was a
tiny gap between Joan's two front teeth and,
strangely enough, between Peter's as well. It

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 245

seemed to Hannah that every well-to-do child in
Hyde Park had developed this gap between the
two incisors and that all the soft pink child
mouths in the district parted to display a hideous
and disfiguring arrangement of complicated wire
and metal. The process of bringing these teeth
together was a long and costly one, totalling be-
tween six hundred and two thousand dollars, de-
pending on the reluctance with which the parted
teeth met, and the financial standing of the teeths'
progenitors. Peter's dental process was not to
begin for another year. Eight was considered
the age. It seemed to be as common as vaccina-
tion.

From Hannah: "I don't know what's the matter
with children's teeth nowadays. My children's teeth
never had to have all this contraption on them. You
got your teeth and that was the end of it."

"Perhaps if they'd paid proper attention to
them," Marcia would reply, "there wouldn't be so
many people going about with disfigured jaws
now."

Then there were the dancing lessons. Joan
went twice a week, Peter once. Joan danced very
well the highly technical steps of the sophisticated
dances taught her at the Krisiloff School. Her
sturdy little legs were trained at the practice bar.
Her baby arms curved obediently above her head

246 GIGOLO

or in fixed relation to the curve of her body in the
dance. She understood and carried into effect
the French technical terms. It was called gym-
nastic and interpretive dancing. There was
about it none of the spontaneity with which a
child unconsciously endows impromptu dance
steps. But it was graceful and lovely. Hannah
thought Joan a second Pavlowa ; took vast de-
light in watching her. Taking Joan and Peter to
these dancing classes was one of the duties that
often devolved upon her. In the children's early
years Marcia had attended a child study class
twice a week and Hannah had more or less minded
the two in their mother's absence. The incon-
gruity of this had never struck her. Or if it had
she had never mentioned it to Marcia. There
were a good many things she never mentioned to
Marcia. Marcia was undoubtedly a conscientious
mother, thinking of her children, planning for her
children, hourly: their food, their clothes, their
training, their manners, their education. Aspar-
agus; steak; French; health shoes; fingernails;
dancing; teeth; hair; curtseys.

"Train all the independence out of 'em,"
Hannah said sometimes, grimly. Not to Marcia,
though. She said it sometimes to her friends
Julia Pierce or Sarah Clapp, or even to Vinie Hard-
ing, the spinster of sixty, for all three, including

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 247

the spinster Vinie, who was a great-aunt, seemed to
be living much the same life that had fallen to
Hannah Winter's lot.

Hyde Park was full of pretty, well-dressed,
energetic young mothers who were leaning hard
upon the Hannah Winters of their own families.
You saw any number of grey-haired, modishly
gowned grandmothers trundling go-carts ; walk-
ing slowly with a moist baby fist in their gentle
clasp; seated on park benches before which blue
rompers dug in the sand or gravel or tumbled on
the grass. The pretty young mothers seemed very
busy, too, in another direction. They attended
classes, played bridge, marketed, shopped, man-
aged their households. Some of them had gone in
for careers. None of them seemed conscious of the
frequency with which they said, "Mother, will you
take the children from two to five this afternoon?"
Or, if they were conscious of it, they regarded it
as a natural and normal request. What are
grandmothers for?

Hannah Winter loved the feel of the small vel-
vet hands in her own palm. The clear blue-white
of their eyes, the softness of their hair, the very
feel of their firm, strong bare legs gave her an
actual pang of joy. But a half hour — an hour —
with them, and she grew .restless, irritable. She
didn't try to define this feeling.

248 GIGOLO

"You say you love the children. And yet when
I ask you to be with them for half a day '

"I do love them. But they make me nervous."

"I don't see how they can make you nervous if
you really care about them."

Joan was Hannah's favourite; resembled her.
The boy, Peter, was blond, like his mother. In
Joan was repeated the grandmother's sallow skin,
dark eyes, vivacity, force. The two, so far apart
in years, were united by a strong natural bond of
sympathy and alikeness. When they were to-
gether on some errand or excursion they had a fine
time. If it didn't last too long.

Sometimes the young married women would
complain to each other about their mothers. "I
don't ask her often, goodness knows. But I think
she might offer to take the children one or two
afternoons during their vacation, anyway. She
hasn't a thing to do. Not a thing."

Among themselves the grandmothers did not
say so much. They had gone to a sterner school.
But it had come to this: Hannah was afraid to
plan her day. So often had she found herself
called upon to forego an afternoon at bridge, a
morning's shopping, an hour's mending, even, or1
reading.

She often had dinner at Marcia's, but not as
often, as she was. asked. More and more she

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 249

longed for and appreciated the orderly quiet and
solitude of her own little room. She never an-
alyzed this, nor did Marcia or Ed. It was a crav-
ing for relaxation on the part of body and nerves
strained throughout almost half a century of in-
tensive living.

Ed and Marcia were always doing charming
things for her. Marcia had made the cushions
and the silk lampshades for her room. Marcia
was always bringing her jellies, and a quarter of
a freshly baked cake done in black Lutie's best
style. Ed and Marcia insisted periodically on
her going with them to the theatre or downtown
for dinner, or to one of the gardens where there
was music and dancing and dining. This was
known as "taking mother out." Hannah Winter
didn't enjoy these affairs as much, perhaps, as she
should have. She much preferred a mild spree
with one of her own cronies. Ed was very care-
ful of her at street crossings and going down
steps, and joggled her elbow a good deal. This
irked her, though she tried not to show it. She
preferred a matinee, or a good picture or a con-
cert with Sarah, or Vinie, or Julia. They could
giggle, and nudge and comment like girls together,
and did. Indeed, they were girls in all but out-
ward semblance. Among one another they recog-
nized this. Their sense of enjoyment was un-

250 GIGOLO

dulled. They liked a double chocolate ice cream
soda as well as ever; a new gown; an interesting
book. As for people! Why, at sixty the world
walked before them, these elderly women, its mind
unclothed, all-revealing. This was painful, some-
times, but interesting always. It was one of the
penalties — and one of the rewards — of living.

After some such excursion Hannah couldn't
very well refuse to take the children to see a Fair-
banks film on a Sunday afternoon when Ed and
Marcia were spending the half-day at the country
club. Marcia was very strict about the children
and the films. They were allowed the saccharine
Pickford, and of course Fairbanks's gravity-de-
fying feats, and Chaplin's gorgeous grotesqueries.
You had to read the titles for Peter. Hannah
wasn't as quick at this as were Ed or Marcia, and
Peter was sometimes impatient, though politely so.

And so sixty swung round. At sixty Hannah
Winter had a suitor. Inwardly she resented him.
At sixty Clint Darrow, a widower now and rever-
ent in speech of the departed one whose extrava-
gance he had deplored, came to live at the hotel in
three-room grandeur, overlooking the lake. A
ruddy, corpulent, paunchy little man, and rakish
withal. The hotel widows made much of him.
Hannah, holding herself aloof, was often surprised
to find her girlhood flame hovering near now,

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 251

speaking of loneliness, of trips abroad, of a string
of pearls unused. There was something virgin
about the way Hannah received these advances.
Marriage was so far from her thoughts; this kind-
ly, plump little man so entirely outside her plans.
He told her his troubles, which should have warned
her. She gave him some shrewd advice, which en-
couraged him. He rather fancied himself as a
Lothario. He was secretly distressed about his
rotund waist line and, theoretically, never ate a
bite of lunch. "I never touch a morsel from
breakfast until dinner time." Still you might see
him any day at noon at the Congress, or at the
Athletic Club, or at one of the restaurants known
for its savoury food, busy with one of the richer
luncheon dishes and two cups of thick creamy coffee.
Though the entire hotel was watching her Hannah
was actually unconscious of Clint Darrow's
attentions, or their markedness, until her son-in-
law Ed teased her about him one day. "Some
gal!" said Ed, and roared with laughter. She
resented this indignantly; felt that they re-
garded her as senile. She looked upon Clint Dar-
row as a fat old thing, if she looked at him at all;
but rather pathetic, too. Hence her kindliness
toward him. Now she avoided him. Thus goaded
he actually proposed marriage and repeated the
items of the European trip, the pearls, and the un-

252 GIGOLO

used house on Woodlawn Avenue. Hannah, feeling
suddenly faint and white, refused him awkwardly.
She was almost indignant. She did not speak of it,
but the hotel, somehow, knew. Hyde Park knew.
The thing leaked out.

"But why?" said Marcia, smiling — giggling, al-
most. "Why? I think it would have been wonder-
ful for you, Mother!"

Hannah suddenly felt that she need not degrade
herself to explain why — she who had once triumphed
over her own ordeal of marriage.

Marcia herself was planning a new career. The
children were seven and nine — very nearly eight and
ten. Marcia said she wanted a chance at self-
expression. She announced a course in landscape
gardening — "landscape architecture" was the new
term.

"Chicago's full of people who are moving to the
suburbs and buying big places out north. They
don't know a thing about gardens. They don't know
a shrub from a tree when they see it. It's a new field
for women — in the country, at least — and I'm dying
to try it. That youngest Fraser girl makes heaps,
and I never thought much of her intelligence. Of
course, after I finish and am ready to take com-
missions, I'll have to be content with small jobs, at
first. But later I may get a chance at grounds
around public libraries and hospitals and railway

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 253

stations. And if I can get one really big job at one
of those new-rich north shore places I'll be made."

The course required two years and was rather ex-
pensive. But Marcia said it would pay, in the end.
Besides, now that the war had knocked Ed's business
into a cocked hat for the next five years or more,
the extra money would come in very handy for the
children and herself and the household.

Hannah thought the whole plan nonsense. "I
can't see that you're pinched, exactly. You may
have to think a minute before you buy fresh straw-
berries for a meringue in February. But you do
buy them." She was remembering her own lean
days, when February strawberries would have been
as unattainable as though she had dwelt on a desert
island.

On the day of the mirror accident in Peacock
Alley, Hannah was meeting Marcia downtown for the
purpose of helping her select spring outfits for the
children. Later, Marcia explained, there would be no
time. Her class met every morning except Satur-
day. Hannah tried to deny the little pang of terror
at the prospect of new responsibility that this latest
move of Marcia's seemed about to thrust upon her.
Marcia wasn't covering her own job, she told her-
self. Why take another! She had given up an
afternoon with Sarah because of this need of Mar-
cia's to-day. Marcia depended upon her mother's

254 GIGOLO

shopping judgment more than she admitted. Think-
ing thus, and conscious of her tardiness (she had
napped for ten minutes after lunch) Hannah Winter
had met, face to face, with a crash, this strange,
strained, rather haggard elderly woman in the
mirror.

It was, then, ten minutes later than 2.07 when she
finally came up to Marcia waiting, lips compressed,
at the Michigan Avenue entrance, as planned.

"I bumped into that mirror —

"Oh, Mom ! I'm sorry. Are you hurt ? How in
the world? . . . Such a morning .
wash day . . . children their lunch . . .
marketing .... wall paper . . . Fifty-
third Street . . . two o'clock . . ."

Suddenly, "Yes, I know," said Hannah Winter,
tartly. "I had to do all those things and more,
forty years ago."

Marcia had a list. . . . Let's see . . .
Those smocked dresses for Joan would probably be
all picked over by this time . . . Light-weight
underwear for Peter . . . Joan's cape .

Hannah Winter felt herself suddenly remote from
all this ; done with it ; finished years and years ago.
What had she to do with smocked dresses, children's
underwear, capes? But she went in and out of the
shops, up and down the aisles, automatically, gave
expert opinion. By five it was over. Hannah felt

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 255

tired, depressed. She was to have dinner at Mar-
cia's to-night. She longed, now, for her own room.
Wished she might go to it and stay there, quietly.

"Marcia, I don't think I'll come to dinner to-
night. I'm so tired. I think I'll just go home "

"But I got the broilers specially for you, and the
sweet potatoes candied the way you like them, and a
lemon cream pie."

When they reached home they found Joan, listless,
on the steps. One of her sudden sore throats.
Stomach, probably. A day in bed for her. By to-
morrow she would be quite all right. Hannah
Winter wondered why she did not feel more concern.
Joan's throats had always thrown her into a greater
panic than she had ever felt at her own children's
illnesses. To-day she felt apathetic, indifferent.

She helped tuck the rebellious Joan in bed. Joan
was spluttering about some plan for to-morrow.
And Marcia was saying, "But you can't go to-
morrow, Joan. You know you can't, with that
throat. Mother will have to stay home with you,
too, and give up her plans to go to the country club
with Daddy, and it's the last chance she'll have, too,
for a long, long time. So you're not the only one
to suffer." Hannah Winter said nothing.

They went in to dinner at 6.30. It was a good
dinner. Hannah Winter ate little, said little. In-
side Hannah Winter a voice — a great, strong voice,

256 GIGOLO

shaking with its own earnestness and force — was
shouting in rebellion. And over and over it said, to
the woman in the mirror at the north end of Peacock
Alley : "Three score — and ten to go. That's what
it says — 'and ten.' And I haven't done a thing I've
wanted to do. I'm afraid to do the things I want
to do. We all are, because of our sons and
daughters. Ten years. I don't want to spend those
ten years taking care of my daughter's children.
I've taken care of my own. A good job, too. No
one helped me. No one helped me. What's the
matter with these modern mothers, with their new-
fangled methods and their efficiency and all? May-
be I'm an unnatural grandmother, but I'm going
to tell Marcia the truth. Yes, I am. If she asks
me to stay home with Joan and Peter to-morrow,
while she and Ed go off to the country club, I'm going
to say, 'No !' I'm going to say, 'Listen to me, Ed
and Marcia. I don't intend to spend the rest of
my life toddling children to the park and playing
second assistant nursemaid. I'm too old — or too
young. I've only got ten years to go, according to
the Bible, and I want to have my fun. I've sown.
I want to reap. My teeth are pretty good, and so
is my stomach. They're better than yours will be
at my age, for all your smart new dentists. So are
my heart and my arteries and my liver and my
nerves. Well. I don't want luxury. What I want

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES 25T

is leisure. I want to do the things I've wanted
to do for forty years, and couldn't. I want, if I
feel like it, to start to learn French and read Jane
Austen and stay in bed till noon. I never could stay
in bed till noon, and I know I can't learn now, but
I'm going to do it once, if it kills me. I'm too old
to bring up a second crop of children, I want to
play. It's terrible to realize that you don't learn
how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's
too late. I know I sound like a selfish old woman,
and I am, and I don't care. I don't care. I want
to be selfish. So will you, too, when you're sixty,
Martha Slocum. You think you're young. But all
of a sudden you'll be sixty, like me. All of a sudden
you'll realize "

"Mother, you're not eating a thing." Ed's kindly
voice.

Marcia, flushed of face, pushed her hair back
from her forehead with a little frenzied familiar ges-
ture. "Eat ! Who could eat with Joan making
that insane racket in there ! Ed, will you tell her to
stop ! Can't you speak to her just once ! After all,
she is your child, too, you know. . . . Peter, eat
your lettuce or you can't have any dessert."

How tired she looked, Hannah Winter thought.
Little Martha. Two babies, and she only a baby
herself yesterday. How tired she looked.

"I wanna go!" wailed Joan, from her bedroom

258 GIGOLO

prison. "I wanna go to-morrow. You promised
me. You said I could. I wanna GO !"

"And I say you can't. Mother has to give up
her holiday, too, because of you. And yet you
don't hear me "

"You!" shouted the naughty Joan, great-grand-
daughter of her great-grandmother, and grand-
daughter of her grandmamma. "You don't care.
Giving up's easy for you. You're an old lady."

And then Hannah Winter spoke up. "I'll stay
with her to-morrow, Marcia. You and Ed go and
have a good time."

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL!

The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here, — but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel !

— Millay.

IF YOU'VE spent more than one day in Okoo-
chee, Oklahoma, you've had dinner at Pardee's.
Someone — a business acquaintance, a friend,
a townsman — has said, "Oh, you stopping at the
Okmulgee Hotel? WON — derful, isn't it? Noth-
ing finer here to the Coast. I bet you thought you
were coming to the wilderness, didn't you? You
Easterners ! Think we live in tents and eat jerked
venison and maize, huh? Never expected, I bet, to
see a twelve-story hotel with separate ice-water fau-
cet in every bathroom and a bath to every room.
What'd you think of the Peacock grill, h'm?"

"Well — uh" — hesitatingly — "very nice, but why
don't you have something native . . . Decora-
tions and . . . Peacock grill is New York, not
Okla "

"Z'that so ! Well, let me tell you you won't find
any better food or service in any restaurant, New

259

260 GIGOLO

York or I don't care where. But say, hotel meals are
hotel meals. You get tired of 'em. Ever eat at Par-
dee's, up the street? Say, there's food! If you're
going to be here in town any time why'n't you call
up there some evening before six — you have to leave
'em know — and get one of Pardee's dinners?
Thursday's chicken. And when I say chicken I mean

Well, just try it, that's all. . . . And for

God's sake don't make a mistake and tip Maxine."

Pardee's you find to be a plain box-like two-story
frame house in a quiet and commonplace residential
district. Plainly — almost scantily — furnished as
to living room and dining room. The dining room
comfortably seats just twenty, but the Pardees
"take" eighteen diners — no more. This because
Mrs. Pardee has eighteen of everything in silver.
And that means eighteen of everything from grape-
fruit spoons to cheese knives; and finger bowls
before and after until you feel like an early Roman.
As for Maxine — the friendly warning is superfluous.
You would as soon have thought of slipping Hebe
a quarter on Olympus — a rather severe-featured
Hebe in a white silk blouse ordered through Vogue.

All this should have been told in the past tense,
because Pardee's is no more. But Okoochee, Okla-
homa, is full of paradoxes like Pardee's. Before
you understand Maxine Pardee and her mother in
the kitchen (dishing up) you have to know Okoo-

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 261

chee. And before you know Okoochee you have to
know Sam Pardee, missing.

There are all sorts of stories about Okoochee,
Oklahoma — and almost every one of them is true.
Especially are the fantastic ones true — the incredible
ones. The truer they are the more do they make such
Arabian knights as Aladdin and Ali Baba appear
dull and worthy gentlemen in the retail lamp and
oil business, respectively. Ali Baba's exploit in oil,
indeed, would have appeared too trivial for recount-
ing if compared with that of any one of a dozen
Okoochee oil wizards.

Take the tale of the Barstows alone, though it
hasn't the slightest bearing on this story. Thirteen
years ago the Barstows had a parched little farm on
the outskirts of what is now the near-metropolis of
Okoochee, but what was then a straggling village in
the Indian Territory. Ma Barstow was a woman of
thirty-five who looked sixty; withered by child-
bearing; scorched by the sun; beaten by the wind;
gnarled with toil; gritty with dust. Ploughing the
barren little farm one day Clem Barstow had noticed
a strange oily scum. It seeped up through the soil
and lay there, heavily. Oil ! Weeks of suspense,
weeks of disappointment, weeks of hope. Through
it all Ma Barstow had washed, scrubbed, cooked as
usual, and had looked after the welfare of the Bar-
stow litter. Seventeen years of drudgery dull the

262 GIGOLO

imagination. When they struck the great gusher —
it's still known as Barstow's Old Faithful — they came
running to her with the news. She had been washing
a great tubful of harsh greasy clothes — overalls,
shirts, drawers. As the men came, shouting, she
appeared in the doorway of the crazy wooden lean-
to, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Oil!" they shouted, idiotically. "Millions!
Biggest gusher yet ! It'll mean millions ! You're a
millionaire!" Then, as she looked at them, dazedly,
"What're you going to do, Mis' Barstow, huh?
What're you going to do with it?"

Ma Barstow had brought one hand up to push
back a straggling wisp of damp hair. Then she
looked at that hand as she brought it down — looked
at it and it's mate, parboiled, shrunken, big-knuckled
from toil. She wiped them both on her apron again,
bringing the palms down hard along her flat thighs.
"Do?" The miracles that millions might accomplish
burst full force on her work-numbed brain. "Do?
First off I'm a-going to have the washing done
out."

Last week Mrs. Clement Barstow was runner-up
in the women's amateur golf tournament played on
the Okoochee eighteen-hole course. She wore tweed
knickers. The Barstow place on the Edgecombe
Road is so honeycombed with sleeping porches, sun
dials, swimming pools, bird baths, terraces, sunken

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 263

gardens, and Italian marble benches that the second
assistant Japanese gardener has to show you the
way to the tennis courts.

That's Okoochee.

It was inevitable that Sam Pardee should hear of
Okoochee; and, hearing of it, drift there. Sam
Pardee was drawn to a new town, a boom town, as
unerringly as a small boy scents a street fight.
Born seventy-five years earlier he would certainly
have been one of those intrepid Forty-niners ; a fear-
less canvas-covered fleet crawling painfully across
a continent, conquering desert and plain and moun-
tain; starving, thirsting, fighting Indians, eating
each other if necessity demanded, with equal dex-
terity and dispatch. Perhaps a trip like this would
have satisfied his wanderlust. Probably not. He
was like a child in a berry patch. The fruit just
beyond was always the ripest and reddest. The
Klondike didn't do it. He was one of the first up
the Yukon in that mad rush. He returned minus all
the money and equipment with which he had started,
including the great toe of his right foot — tribute
levied by the frozen North. From boom town to
boom town he went. The first stampede always
found him there, deep in blue-prints, engineering
sheets, prospectuses. But no sooner did the town
install a water-works and the First National Bank
house itself in a Portland-cement Greek temple with

264 GIGOLO

Roman pillars and a mosaic floor than he grew rest-
less and was on the move.

A swashbuckler, Sam Pardee, in tan shoes and a
brown derby. An 1890 Villon handicapped by a
home-loving wife; an incurable romantic married
to a woman who judged as shiftless any housewife
possessed of less than two dozen bath towels, twelve
tablecloths, eighteen wash cloths, and at least three
dozen dish towels, hand-hemmed. Milly Pardee's
idea of adventure was testing the recipes illustrated
in the How To Use The Cheaper Cuts page in the
back of the woman's magazines.

Perversely enough, they had been drawn together
by the very attraction of dissimilarity. He had
found her feminine home-loving qualities most
appealing. His manner of wearing an invisible
cloak, sword and buckler, though actually garbed
in ready-mades, thrilled her. She had come of a
good family; he of, seemingly, no family at all.
When the two married, Milly's people went through
that ablutionary process known as washing their
hands of her. Thus ideally mismated they tried to
make the best of it — and failed. At least, Sam
Pardee failed. Milly Pardee said, "Goodness knows
I tried to be a good wife to him." The plaint of
all unappreciated wives since Griselda.

Theirs was a feast-and-famine existence. Some-
times Sam Pardee made sudden thousands. Mrs.

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 265

Pardee would buy silver, linen, and other household
furnishings ranging all the way from a grand piano
to a patent washing machine. The piano and the
washing machine usually were whisked away within a
few weeks or months, at the longest. But she cannily
had the linen and silver stamped — stamped unmis-
takably and irrevocably with a large, flourishing
capital P, embellished with floral wreaths. Even-
tually some of the silver went the way of the piano
and washing machine. But Milly Pardee clung
stubbornly to a dozen and a half of everything.
She seemed to feel that if once she had less than
eighteen fish forks the last of the solid ground of
family respectability would sink under her feet.
For years she carried that silver about wrapped in
trunks full of the precious linen, and in old under-
wear and cotton flannel kimonos and Sam's silk socks
and Maxine's discarded baby-clothes. She clung to
it desperately, as other women cling to jewels, know-
ing that when this is gone no more will follow.

When the child was born Milly Pardee wanted to
name her Myrtle but her husband had said, suddenly,
"No, call her Maxine."

"After whom?" In Mrs. Pardee's code you
named a child "after" someone.

He had seen Maxine Elliott in the heyday of her
cold, clear, brainless beauty, with her great, slightly
protuberant eyes set so far apart, her exquisitely

266 GIGOLO

chiselled white nose, and her black black hair. She
had thrilled him.

"After my Uncle Max that lives in — uh — Aus-
tralia."

"I've never heard you talk of any Uncle Max,"
said Mrs. Pardee, coldly.

But the name had won. How could they know
that Maxine would grow up to be a rather bony
young woman who preferred these high-collared
white silk blouses ; and said "eyether."

Maxine had been about twelve when Okoochee
beckoned Sam Pardee. They were living in Chicago
at the time ; had been there for almost three years —
that is, Mrs. Pardee and Maxine had been there.
Sam was in and out on some mysterious business
of his own. His affairs were always spoken of as
"deals" or "propositions." And they always, seem-
ingly, required his presence in a city other than that
in which they were living — if living can be said to
describe the exceedingly impermanent perch to which
they clung. They had a four-room flat. Maxine
was attending a good school. Mrs. Pardee was
using the linen and silver daily. There was a linen
closet down the hall, just off the dining room. You
could open the door and feast your eyes on orderly
piles of neatly laundered towels, sheets, tablecloths,
napkins, tea towels. Mrs. Pardee marketed and
cooked, contentedly. She was more than a merely

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 267

good cook; she was an alchemist in food stuffs.
Given such raw ingredients as butter, sugar, flour,
eggs, she could evolve a structure of pure gold
that melted on the tongue. She could take an och-
erous old hen, dredge its parts in flour, brown it
in fat sizzling with onion at the bottom of an iron
kettle, add water, a splash of tomato and a pinch
of seasoning, and bear triumphantly to the table a
platter heaped with tender fricassee over which a
smooth, saddle-brown gravy simmered fragrantly.
She ate little herself, as do most expert cooks, and
found her reward when Sam or Maxine uttered a
choked and appreciative "Mmm!"

In the midst of creature comforts such as these
Sam Pardee said, one evening, "Oil."

Mrs. Pardee passed it, but not without remon-
strance. "It's the same identical French dressing
you had last night, Sam. I mixed enough for twice.
And you didn't add any oil last night."

Sam Pardee came out of his abstraction long
enough to emit a roar of laughter and an unsatis-
factory explanation. "I was thinking of oil in
wells, not in cruets. Millions of barrels of oil, not
a spoonful. Crude, not olive."

She saw her child, her peace, her linen closet
threatened. "Sam Pardee, you don't mean "

"Oklahoma. That's what I meant by oil. It's
oozing with it."

268 GIGOLO

Real terror leaped into Milly Pardee's eyes.

"Not Oklahoma. Sam, I couldn't stand "

Suddenly she stiffened with resolve. Maxine's re-
port card had boasted three stars that week. Okla-
homa! Why, there probably were no schools at
all in Oklahoma. "I won't bring my child up in
Oklahoma. Indians, that's what! Scalped in our
beds."

Above Sam Pardee's roar sounded Maxine's ex-
cited treble. "Oo, Oklahoma ! I'd love it."

Her mother turned on her, almost fiercely. "You
wouldn't."

The child had thrown out her arms in a wide
gesture. "It sounds so far away and different. I
like different places. I like any place that isn't
here."

Milly Pardee had stared at her. It was the
father talking in the child. Any place that isn't
here. Different.

Out of years of bitter experience she tried to
convince the child of her error; tried, as she had
striven for years to convince Sam Pardee.

"Places are just the same," she said, bitterly,
"and so are people, when you get to 'em."

"They can't be," the child argued, stubbornly.
"India and China and Spain and Africa."

Milly Pardee had turned accusing eyes on her
amused husband. "I hope you're satisfied."

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 269

He shrugged. "Well, the kid's right. That's
living."

She disputed this, fiercely. "It is not. Living's
staying in a place, and helping it grow, and grow-
ing up with it and belonging. Belong!" It was
the cry of the rolling stone that is bruised and
weary.

Sam Pardee left for Oklahoma the following week.
Milly Pardee refused to accompany him. It was the
first time she had taken this stand. "If you go
there, and like it, and want to settle down there, I'll
come. I know the Bible says, 'Whither thou goest,
I will go,' but I guess even What'shername would
have given up at Oklahoma."

For three years, then, Sam Pardee's letters reeked
of oil: wells, strikes, gushers, drills, shares, out-
fits. It was early Oklahoma in the rough. This
one was getting five hundred a day out of his well.
That one had sunk forty thousand in his and lost
out.

"Five hundred what?" Maxine asked. "Forty
thousand what?"

"Dollars, I guess," Milly Pardee answered.
"That's the way your father always talks. I'd
rather hare twenty-five a week, myself, and know it's
coming without fail."

"I wouldn't. Where's the fun in that ?"

"Fun! There's more fun in twenty-five a week

270 GIGOLO

in a pay envelope than in forty thousand down a dry
well."

Maxine was fifteen now. "I wish we could live
with Father in Oklahoma. I think it's wrong not
to."

Milly Pardee was beginning to think so, too.
Especially since her husband's letters had grown
rarer as the checks they contained had grown larger.
On his occasional trips back to Chicago he said noth-
ing of their joining him out there. He seemed to
have grown accustomed to living alone. Liked the
freedom, the lack of responsibility. In sudden fright
and resolve Milly Pardee sold the furnishings of the
four-room flat, packed the peripatetic linen and sil-
ver, and joined a surprised and rather markedly
unenthusiastic husband in Okoochee, Oklahoma.
A wife and a fifteen-year-old daughter take a good
deal of explaining on the part of one who has posed
for three years as a bachelor.

The first thing Maxine said as they rode (in a
taxi) to the hotel, was: "But the streets are paved!"
Then, "But it's all electric lighted with cluster
lights!" And, in final and utter disgust, "Why,
there's a movie sign that says, 'The Perils of
Pauline.' That was showing at the Elite on Forty-
third Street in Chicago just the night before we
left."

Milly Pardee smiled grimly. "Palestine's paved,

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 271

too," she observed. "And they're probably running
that same reel there next week."

Milly Pardee and her husband had a plain talk.
Next day Sam Pardee rented the two-story frame
house in which, for years, the famous Pardee dinners
were to be served. But that came later. The
house was rented with the understanding that the
rent was to be considered as payment made toward
final purchase. The three lived there in comfort.
Maxine went to the new pressed-brick, many-win-
dowed high school. Milly Pardee was happier than
she had been in all her wedded life. Sam Pardee
had made no fortune in oil, though he talked in
terms of millions. In a burst of temporary pros-
perity, due to a boom in some oil-stocks Sam Pardee
had purchased early in the game, they had paid
five thousand dollars down on the house and lot.
That left a bare thousand to pay. There were three
good meals a day. Milly Pardee belonged to the
Okoochee Woman's Thursday Club. All the women
in Okoochee seemed to have come from St. Louis,
Columbus, Omaha, Cleveland, Kansas City, and they
spoke of these as Back East. When they came call-
ing they left cards, punctiliously. They played
bridge, observing all the newest rulings, and speaking
with great elaborateness of manner.

"Yours, I believe, Mrs. Tutwiler."

"Pardon, but didn't you notice I played the ace?"

272 GIGOLO

Maxine graduated in white, with a sash. Mrs.
Pardee was on the committee to beautify the grounds
around the M. K. & T. railroad station. When
relatives from Back East (meaning Nebraska,
Kansas, or Missouri) visited an Okoocheeite cards
were sent out for an "At Home," and everything was
as formal as a court levee in Victoria's time. Mrs.
Pardee began to talk of buying an automobile.
The town was full of them. There were the flivvers
and lower middle-class cars owned by small mer-
chants, natives (any one boasting twelve year's resi-
dence) and unsuccessful adventurers of the Sam
Pardee type. Then there were the big, high-powered
scouting cars driven by steely-eyed, wiry, cold-
blooded young men from Pennsylvania and New
York. These young men had no women-folk with
them. Held conferences in smoke-filled rooms at
the Okmulgee Hotel. The main business street was
called Broadway, and the curb on either side was
hidden by lines of cars drawn up slantwise at an
angle of ninety. No farmer wagons. A small
town with all the airs of a big one; with none of
the charming informality of the old Southern small
town ; none of the engaging ruggedness of the estab-
lished Middle-Western town ; none of the faded gen-
tility of the old New England town. A strident
dame, this, in red satin and diamonds, insisting that

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 273

she is a lady. Interesting, withal, and bulging with
personality and possibility.

Milly Pardee loved it. She belonged. She was
chairman of this committee and secretary of that.
Okoochee was always having parades, with floats,
sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Okoochee
and distinguished by schoolgirls grouped on bunt-
ing-covered motor trucks, their hair loose and lately
relieved from crimpers, three or four inches of sen-
sible shirt-sleeve showing below the flowing lines of
their cheesecloth Grecian robes. Maxine was often
one of these. Yes, Milly Pardee was happy.

Sam Pardee was not. He began, suddenly, to talk
of Mexico. Frankly, he was bored. For the first
time in his life he owned a house — or nearly. There
was eleven hundred dollars in the bank. Roast on
Sunday. Bathroom shelf to be nailed Sunday morn-
ing. Y. M. C. A., Rotary Club, Knights of Columbus,
Kiwanis, Boy Scouts.

"Hell," said Sam Pardee, "this town's no good."

Milly Pardee took a last stand. "Sam Pardee,
I'll never leave here. I'm through traipsing up and
down the world with you, like a gypsy. I want a
home. I want to be settled. I want to stay here.
And I'm going to."

"You're sure you want to stay?"

"I've moved for the last time. I — I'm going to
plant a Burbank clamberer at the side of the porch,

274 GIGOLO

and they don't begin to flower till after the first
ten years. That's how sure I am."

There came a look into Sam Pardee's eyes. He
rubbed his neat brown derby round and round with
his coat sleeve. He was just going out.

"Well, that's all right. I just wanted to know.
Where's Max?"

"She stayed late. They're rehearsing for the
Pageant of Progress down at the Library."

Sam Pardee looked thoughtful — a little regretful,
one might almost have said. Then he clapped on
the brown derby, paused on the top step of the porch
to light his cigar, returned the greeting of young
Arnold Hatch who was sprinkling the lawn next
door, walked down the street with the quick, nervous
step that characterized him, boarded the outgoing
train for God knows where, and was never heard
from again.

"Well," said the worse-than-widowed (it was her
own term), "we've got the home."

She set about keeping it. We know that she had
a gift for cooking that amounted almost to culinary
inspiration. Pardee's dinners became an institu-
tion in Okoochee. Mrs. Pardee cooked. Maxine
served. And not even the great new stucco palaces
on the Edgecombe Road boasted finer silver, more
exquisite napery. As for the food — old Clem
Barstow himself, who had a chef and a butler and

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 275

sent east for lobster and squabs weekly, came to
Pardee's when he wanted a real meal. From the
first they charged one dollar and fifty cents for
their dinners. Okoochee, made mellow by the steam-
ing soup, the savoury meats, the bland sauces and
rich dessert, paid it ungrudgingly. They served only
eighteen — no more, though Okoochee could never un-
derstand why. On each dinner Mrs. Pardee made
a minimum of seventy-five cents. Eighteen times
seventy-five . . . naught and carry the four
. . . naught . . . five . . . thirteen-
fifty . . . seven times . . . well, ninety-
five dollars or thereabouts each week isn't so bad.
Out of this Mrs. Pardee managed to bank a neat sum.
She figured that at the end of ten or fifteen years . . .

"I hate them," said Maxine, washing dishes in
the kitchen. "Greedy pigs."

"They're nothing of the kind. They like good
food, and I'm thankful they do. If they didn't I
don't know where I'd be."

"We might be anywhere — so long as it could be
away from here. Dull, stupid, stick-in-the-muds,
all of them."

"Why, they're no such thing, Maxine Pardee!
They're from all over the world, pretty nearly.
Why, just last Thursday they were counting there
were sixteen different states represented in the eigh-
teen people that sat down to dinner."

276 GIGOLO

"Pooh ! States ! That isn't the world."

"What is, then?"

Maxine threw out her arms, sprinkling dish-water
from her dripping finger tips with the wide-flung
gesture. "Cairo! Zanzibar! Brazil! Trinidad!
Seville — uh — Samar — Samarkand."

"Where's Samarkand?"

"I don't know. And I'm going to see it all some
day. And the different people. The people that
travel, and know about what kind of wine with the
roast and the fish. You know — the kind in the
novels that say, 'You've chilled this sauterne too
much, Bemish.' "

"And when you do see all these places," retorted
Mrs. Pardee, with the bitterness born of long years
of experience, "you'll find that in every one of them
somebody's got a boarding house called Pardee's,
or something like that, where the people flock same's
they do here, for a good meal."

"Yes, but what kind of people?"

"Same kind that comes here." Sam Pardee had
once taken his wife to see a performance of The
Man From Home when that comedy was at the
height of its popularity. A line from this play
flashed into Mrs. Pardee's mind now, and she para-
phrased it deftly. "There are just as many kinds
of people in Okoochee as there are in Zanzibar."

"I don't believe it."

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 277

"Well, it's so. And I'm thankful we've got the
comforts of home."

At this Maxine laughed a sharp little laugh that
was almost a bark. Perhaps she was justified.

The eighteen straggled in between six and six-
thirty, nightly. A mixture of townspeople and
strangers. While Maxine poured the water in the
dining room the neat little parlour became a mess.
The men threw hats and overcoats on the backs of
the chairs. Their rubbers slopped under them.
They rarely troubled to take them off. While wait-
ing avidly for dinner to be served they struck
matches and lighted cigarettes and cigars. Some-
times they called in to Maxine, "Say, girlie, when'll
supper be ready? I'm 'bout gone."

The women trotted upstairs, chattering, and
primped and fussed in Maxine's neat and austere
little bedroom. They used Maxine's powder and
dropped it about on the tidy dresser and the floor.
They brushed away only what had settled on the
front of their dresses. They forgot to switch off
the electric light, leaving Maxine to do it, thriftily,
between serving courses. Every penny counted.
Every penny meant release.

After dinner Maxine and her mother sat down
to eat off the edge of the kitchen table. It was
often nine o'clock before the last straggling diner,
sprawling on the parlour davenport with his evening

278 GIGOLO

paper and cigar, departed, leaving Maxine to pick
up the scattered newspapers, cigarette butts, ashes ;
straighten chairs, lock doors.

Then the dishes. The dishes !

When Arnold Hatch asked her to go to a movie
she shook her head, usually. "I'm too tired. I'm
going to read, in bed."

"Read, read! That's all you do. What're you
reading?"

"Oh, about Italy. La bel Napoli!" She col-
lected travel folders and often talked in their terms.
In her mind she always said "brooding Vesuvius";
"blue Mediterranean"; "azure coasts"; "Egypt's
golden sands."

Arnold Hatch ate dinner nightly at Pardee's. He
lived in the house next door, which he owned, rent-
ing it to an Okoochee family and retaining the up-
stairs front bedroom for himself. A tall, thin, eye-
glassed young man who worked in the offices of the
Okoochee Oil and Refining Company, believed in
Okoochee, and wanted to marry Maxine. He had
twice kissed her. On both these occasions his eye-
glasses had fallen off, taking the passion, so to
speak, out of the process. When Maxine giggled,
uncontrollably, he said, "Go on — laugh! But some
day I'm going to kiss you and I'll take my glasses
off first. Then look out !"

You have to have a good deal of humour to stand

IF 1 SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 279

being laughed at by a girl you've kissed ; especially
a girl who emphasizes her aloofness by wearing those
high-collared white silk blouses.

"You haven't got a goitre, have you?" said Arnold
Hatch, one evening, brutally. Then, as she had
flared in protest, "I know it. I love that little
creamy satin hollow at the base of your throat."

"You've never s " The scarlet flamed up. She

was human.

"I know it. But I love it just the same." Pretty
good for a tall thin young man who worked in the
offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company.

Sometimes he said, "I'm darned certain you like
me" — bravely — "love me. Why won't you marry
me? Cut out all this slaving. I could support you.
Not in much luxury, maybe, but "

"And settle down in Okoochee! Never see any-
thing ! Stuck in this God-forsaken hole ! This drab,
dull, oil-soaked village! When there are wonderful
people, wonderful places, colour, romance, beauty!
Damascus! Mandalay! Singapore! Hongkong!
. . . Hongkong! It sounds like a temple bell.
It thrills me."

"Over in Hongkong," said Arnold Hatch, "I ex-
pect some Chinese Maxine Pardee would say, Okoo-
chee! It sounds like an Indian war drum. It
thrills me.'"

Sometimes Maxine showed signs of melting. But

280 GIGOLO

she always congealed again under the influence of
her resolve. One evening an out-of-town diner, on
hearing her name, said, "Pardee! Hra. Probably
a corruption of Pardieu. A French name originally,
I suppose."

After that there was no approaching her for a
week. Maxine Pardieu. Pardieu. "By God!" it
meant. A chevalier he must have been, this Pardieu.
A musketeer ! A swashbuckler, with lace falling over
his slim white hand, and his hand always ready on
his sword. Red heels. Plumed hat. Pardieu!

How she hated anew the great oil tanks that rose
on the town's outskirts, guarding it like giant sen-
tinels. The new houses. The new country club.
Twenty-one miles of asphalt road. Population in
1900, only 467. In 1920 over 35,000. Slogan,
Watch Us Grow. Seventeen hundred oil and gas
wells. Fields of corn and cotton. Skyscrapers. The
Watonga Building, twelve stories. Haynes Block,
fourteen stories. Come West, young man! Ugh!

Sometimes she made little rhymes in her mind.

There's Singapore and Zanzibar,
And Cairo and Calais.
There's Samarkand and Alcazar,
Rangoon and Mandalay.

"Yeh," said Arnold Hatch, one evening, when
they were talking in the Pardee back yard. It was

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 281

nine o'clock. Dishes done. A moon. October.
Maxine had just murmured her little quatrain. They
were standing by the hedge of pampas grass that
separated the Pardee yard from Hatch's next door.
"Yeh," said Arnold Hatch. "Likewise:

"There's Seminole and Shawnee,
Apache, Agawam.
There's Agua and Pawnee,
Walonga, Waukeetom."

He knew his Oklahoma.

"Oh !" exclaimed Maxine, in a little burst of fury ;
and stamped her foot down hard. Squ-ush! said
something underfoot. "Oh !" said Maxine again ; in
surprise this time. October was a dry month. She
peered down. Her shoe was wet. A slimy some-
thing clung to it. A scummy something shone re-
flected in the moonlight. She had not lived ten
years in Oklahoma for nothing. Arnold Hatch
bent down. Maxine bent down. The greasy wet
patch lay just between the two back yards. They
touched it, fearfully, with their forefingers. Then
they straightened and looked at each other. Oil.
Oil!

Things happened like that in Oklahoma.

You didn't try to swing a thing like that yourself.
You leased your land for a number of years. A

282 GIGOLO

well cost between forty and sixty thousand dollars.
You leased to a company represented by one or two
of those cold-blooded steely-eyed young men from
Pennsylvania or New York. There was a good deal
of trouble about it, too. This was a residence dis-
trict— one of the oldest in this new town. But they
bought the Pardee place and the Hatch place.
And Arnold Hatch, who had learned a thing or two
in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Com-
pany, drove a hard bargain for both. The yard
was overrun with drillers, lawyers, engineers, super-
intendents, foremen, machinery.

Arnold came with papers to sign. "Five hun-
dred a day," he said, "and a percentage." He
named the percentage. Maxine and her mother re-
peated this after him, numbly.

Mrs. Pardee had been the book-keeper in the
Pardee menage. She tried some mathematical gym-
nastics now and bumped her arithmetical nose.

"Five hundred a day. Including Sundays,
Arnold?"

"Including Sundays."

Her lips began to move. "Seven times five . . .
thirty-five hundred a ... fifty-two times
thirty "

She stopped, overcome. But she began again,
wildly, as a thought came to her. "Why, I could
build a house. A house, up on Edgecombe. A

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 283

house like the Barstows' with lawns, and gardens,
and sleeping porches, and linen closets! .
Oh, Maxine ! We'll live there "

"Not I," said Maxine, crisply. Arnold, watching
her, knew what she was going to say before she said
it. "I'm going to see the world. I want to pene-
trate a civilization so old that its history wanders
down the centuries and is lost in the dim mists of
mythology." [See Baedeker.]

Sudden wealth had given Arnold a new master-
fulness. "Marry me before you go."

"Not at all," replied Maxine. "On the boat going
over "

"Over where?"

"Honolulu, on my way to Japan, I'll meet a tall
bearded stranger, sunburned, with the flame of the
Orient in his eyes, and on his thin, cruel, sensual
mouth "

Arnold Hatch took off his glasses. Maxine

stiffened. "Don't you d " But she was too

late.

"There," said Arnold, "he'll have to have some
beard, and some flame, and some thin, cruel, sensual
mouth to make you forget that one."

Maxine started, alone, against her mother's re-
monstrances. After she'd picked out her boat she
changed to another because she learned, at the last
minute, that the first boat was an oil-burner. Being

284 GIGOLO

an inexperienced traveller she took a good many
trunks and was pretty unpopular with the steward
before he could make her understand that one trunk
to the stateroom was the rule. On the first two days
out on the way to the Hawaiian Islands she spent
all her time (which was twenty-four hours a day
in her bed) hoping that Balboa was undergoing
fitting torment in punishment for his little joke
about discovering the so-called Pacific Ocean. But
the swell subsided, and the wind went down, and
Maxine appeared on deck and in another twelve
hours had met everyone from the purser to the
honeymoon couple, in the surprising way one does
on these voyages. She looked for the tall bearded
stranger with the sunburn of the Orient and the thin,
cruel, sensual lips. But he didn't seem to be about.
Strangely enough, everyone she talked to seemed to
be from Nebraska, or Kansas, or Iowa, or Missouri.
Not only that, they all were very glib with names
and places that had always seemed mythical and
glamorous.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Tannenbaum and I went to India
last year, and Persia and around. Real interest-
ing. My, but they're dirty, those towns. We used
to kick about Des Moines, now that they use so
much soft coal, and all the manufacturing and all.
But my land, it's paradise compared to those places.
And the food ! Only decent meals we had in Egypt

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 285

was a place in Cairo called Pardee's, run by a
woman whose husband's left her or died, or some-
thing. Real home-loving woman she was. Such
cooking . . . Why, that's so ! Your name's
Pardee, too, isn't it! Well, I always say to Mr.
Tannenbaum, it's a small world, after all. No rela-
tion, of course?"

"Of course not." How suddenly safe Oklahoma
seemed. And Arnold Hatch.

"Where you going from Honolulu, Miss Pardee?"

"Samarkand."

"Beg pardon?"

"Samarkand."

"Oh, yeh. Samar — le' see now, where is that,
exactly? I used to know, but I'm such a hand for
forgetting "

"I don't know," said Maxine, distinctly.

"Don't — but I thought you said you were
going "

"I am. But I don't know where it is."

"Then how "

"You just go to an office, where there are folders
and a man behind the desk, and you say you want
to go to Samarkand. He shows you. You get
on a boat. That's all."

The people from Iowa, and Kansas, and Nebraska
and Missouri said, Oh, yes, and there was nothing
like travel. So broadening. Maxine asked them if

286 GIGOLO

they knew about the Vale of Kashmir and one of
them, astoundingly enough, did. A man from Mil-
waukee, Wisconsin, who had spent a year there super-
intending the erection of a dredge. A plump man,
with eyeglasses and perpetually chewing a dead
cigar.

Gold and sunlight, myrrh and incense, the tinkling
of anklets. Maxine clung to these wildly, in her
mind.

But Honolulu, the Moana Hotel on Waikiki
Beach, reassured her. It was her dream come true.
She knew it would be so when she landed and got
her first glimpse of the dark-skinned natives on the
docks, their hats and necks laden with leis of flowers.
There were palm trees. There were flaming hibis-
cus hedges. Her bed was canopied with white net-
ting, like that of a princess (the attendant explained
it was to keep out the mosquitoes).

You ate strange fruits (they grew a little sick-
ening, after a day or two). You saw Duke, the
Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a
surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked
like a god of bronze, balancing miraculously on a
plank carried in on the crest of a wave with the
velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese women
in tight kimonos and funny little stilted flapping
footgear running to catch a street car; and you
laughed at the incongruity of it. You made the

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 287

three-day trip to the living volcano at Hilo and sat
at the crater's brink watching the molten lava lake
tossing, hissing, writhing. You hung there, between
horror and fascination.

"Certainly a pretty sight, isn't it?" said her
fellow travellers. "Makes the Grand Canyon look
sick, I think, don't you?"

"I've never seen it."

"Oh, really !"

On her return from Hilo she saw him. A Vandyke
beard ; smouldering eyes ; thin red lips ; lean nervous
hands ; white flannel evening clothes ; sunburned a
rich brown. Maxine drew a long breath as if she
had been running. It was after dinner. The broad
veranda was filled with gayly gowned women; uni-
formed officers from the fort ; tourists in white.
They were drinking their after-dinner coffee, smok-
ing, laughing. The Hawaiian orchestra made ready
to play for the dancing on the veranda. They be-
gan to play. Their ukeleles throbbed and moaned.
The musicians sang in their rich, melodious voices
some native song of a lost empire and a dead king.
It tore at your heart. You ached with the savage
beauty of it. It was then she saw him. He was
seated alone, smoking, drinking, watching the crowd
with amused, uneager glance. She had seen him
before. It was a certainty, this feeling. She had
known him — seen him — before. Perhaps not in this

288 GIGOLO

life. Perhaps only in her dreams. But they had
met.

She stared at him until her eye caught his. It
was brazen, but she was shameless. Nothing mat-
tered. This was no time for false modesty. Her
eyes held his. Then, slowly, she rose, picked up her
trailing scarf, and walked deliberately past him,
glancing down at him as she passed. He half rose,
half spoke. She went down the steps leading from
the veranda to the court-yard, down this walk to
the pier, down the pier to the very end, where the
little roofed shelter lay out in the ocean, bathed in
moonlight, fairylike, unreal. The ocean was a thing
of molten silver. The sound of the wailing voices
in song came to her on the breeze, agonizing in its
beauty. There, beyond, lay Pearl Harbour. From
the other side, faintly, you heard the music and
laughter from the Yacht Club.

Maxine seated herself. The after-dinner couples
had not yet strolled out. They were waiting for the
dancing up there on the hotel veranda. She waited.
She waited. She saw the glow of his cigar as he came
down the pier, a tall, slim white figure in the moon-
light. It was just like a novel. It was a novel, come
to life. He stood a moment at the pier's edge, smok-
ing. Then he tossed his cigar into the water and it
fell with a little s-st ! He stood another moment, ir-
resolutely. Then he came over to her.

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 289

"Nice night."

In Okoochee you would have said, "Sir!" But
not here. Not now. Not Maxine Pardieu. "Yes,
isn't it !"

The mellow moon fell full on him — bronzed,
bearded, strangely familiar.

At his next question she felt a little faint.
"Haven't we — met before?"

She toyed with the end of her scarf. "You feel
that, too?"

He nodded. He took a cigarette from a flat plat-
inum case. "Mind if I smoke? Perhaps you'll
join me?" Maxine took a cigarette, uncertainly.
Lighted it from the match he held. Put it to her lips.
Coughed, gasped. "Maybe you're not used to those.
I smoke a cheap cigarette because I like 'em. Drom-
edaries, those are. Eighteen cents a package."

Maxine held the cigarette in her unaccustomed
fingers. Her eyes were on his face. "You said you
thought — you felt — we'd met before?"

"I may be mistaken, but I never forget a face.
Where are you from, may I ask?"

Maxine hesitated a moment. "Oklahoma."

He slapped his leg a resounding thwack. "I knew
it! I'm hardly ever mistaken. Name's — wait a
minute — Pardee, isn't it?"

"Yes. But how "

"One of the best meals I ever had in my life, Miss

290 GIGOLO

Pardee. Two years ago, it was. I was lecturing on
Thibet and the Far East."

"Lecturing?" Her part of the conversation was
beginning to sound a good deal like the dialogue in a
badly written play.

"Yes, I'm Brainerd, you know. I thought you
knew, when you spoke up there on the veranda."

"Brainerd?" It was almost idiotic.

"Brainerd. Paul Brainerd, the travelogue man.
I remember I gave you and your mother compli-
mentary tickets to the lecture. I've got a great
memory. Got to have, in my business. Let's see,
that town was "

"Okoochee," faintly.

"Okoochee ! That's it ! It's a small world after
all, isn't it? Okoochee. Why, I'm on my way to
Oklahoma now. I'm going to spend two months or
more there, taking pictures of the vast oil fields, the
oil wells. A new country. An Aladdin country ; a
new growth; one of the most amazing and pictur-
esque bits in the history of our amazing country.
History in the making. An empire over-night.
Oklahoma! Well! What a relief, after war-torn
Europe and an out-worn civilization."

"But you — you're from ?"

"I'm from East Orange, New Jersey, myself. Got
a nice little place down there that I wouldn't swap
for all the palaces of the kings. No sir! . . .

IF I SHOULD EVER TRAVEL! 291

Already? Well, yes, it is a little damp out here,
so close to the water. Mrs. Brainerd won't risk it.
I'll walk up with you. I'd like to have you meet
her."

THE END

Ferber, Edna

3511 Gigolo clst ed.3

E53G5

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