A Dance of Folly and Pleasure: Stories, Page 2

  Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drugstore two doors away laughed and walked down the street.

  Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to himself a ‘cinch’. A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large policeman of severe demeanour leaned against a water-plug.

  It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated ‘masher’. The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would ensure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle.

  Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and ‘hems’, smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of the ‘masher’. With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said: ‘Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?’

  The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cosy warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught Soapy’s coat-sleeve.

  ‘Sure, Mike,’ she said joyfully, ‘if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds. I’d have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.’

  With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman, overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.

  At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of ‘disorderly conduct’.

  On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the welkin.

  The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen: ‘ ’Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them be.’

  Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind.

  In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.

  ‘My umbrella,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Oh, is it?’ sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. ‘Well, why don’t you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you call a cop? There stands one at the corner.’

  The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously.

  ‘Of course,’ said the umbrella man – ‘that is – well, you know how these mistakes occur – I – if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me – I picked it up this morning in a restaurant – If you recognise it as yours, why – I hope you’ll—’

  ‘Of course it’s mine,’ said Soapy viciously.

  The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away.

  Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.

  At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

  But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence.

  The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves – for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.

  The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.

  And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him tomorrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would—

  Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.

  ‘What are you doin’ here?’ asked the officer.

  ‘Nothin’,’ said Soapy.

  ‘Then come along,’ said the policeman.

  ‘Three months on the Island,’ said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.

  The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

  The Blue Light Drugstore is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-à-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for a painkiller it will not give you a bonbon.

  The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk – pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough-drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.

  Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor,
a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey’s corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.

  Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs Riddle’s, two squares away. Mrs Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain – you must have guessed it – Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal – the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside, he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.

  The fly in Ikey’s ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk McGowan.

  Mr McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about by Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey’s friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drugstore to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.

  One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat, comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.

  ‘Ikey,’ said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, ‘get busy with your ear. It’s drugs for me if you’ve got the line I need.’

  Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr McGowan for the usual evidences of conflict, but found none.

  ‘Take your coat off,’ he ordered. ‘I guess already that you have been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up.’

  Mr McGowan smiled. ‘Not them,’ he said. ‘Not any Dagoes. But you’ve located the diagnosis all right enough – it’s under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey – Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married tonight.’

  Ikey’s left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not. Meanwhile Mr McGowan’s smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.

  ‘That is,’ he continued, ‘if she keeps in the notion until the time comes. We’ve been layin’ pipes for the gateway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on tonight, and Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it’s five hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.’

  ‘You said you wanted drugs,’ remarked Ikey.

  Mr McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed – a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.

  ‘I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start tonight for a million,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9.30. It’s got to come off. And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!’ – Mr McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.

  ‘I don’t see then yet,’ said Ikey shortly, ‘what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.’

  ‘Old man Riddle don’t like me a little bit,’ went on the uneasy suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. ‘For a week he hasn’t let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn’t for losin’ a boarder they’d have bounced me long ago. I’m makin’ twenty dollars a week and she’ll never regret flyin’ the coop with Chunk McGowan.’

  ‘You will excuse me, Chunk,’ said Ikey. ‘I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon.’

  ‘Say,’ said McGowan, looking up suddenly, ‘say, Ikey, ain’t there a drug of some kind – some kind of powders that’ll make a girl like you better if you give ’em to her?’

  Ikey’s lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued: ‘Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker uptown and fed ’em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in less than two weeks.’

  Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires. Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy’s territory he was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.

  ‘I thought,’ went on Chunk hopefully, ‘that if I had one of them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper tonight it might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don’t need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for a couple of hours it’ll do the trick.’

  ‘When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?’ asked Ikey.

  ‘Nine o’clock,’ said Mr McGowan. ‘Supper’s at seven. At eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his backyard, where there’s a board off Riddle’s fence, next door. I go under her window and help her down the fire escape. We’ve got to make it early on the preacher’s account. It’s all dead easy if Rosy don’t balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?’

  Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.

  ‘Chunk,’ said he, ‘it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you.’

  Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid, if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.

  The subtlety of Ikey’s action becomes apparent upon recital of his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr Riddle and disclosed the plans of McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.

  ‘Much obliged,’ he said briefly to Ikey. ‘The lazy Irish loafer! My own room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper and load the shotgun and wait. If he comes in my backyard he’ll go away in an ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.’

  With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours’ deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.

  All night in the Blue Light Store he waited at his duties for chance news of the tragedy, but none came.

  At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started hurriedly for Mrs Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing streetcar and grasped his hand – Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with joy.

  ‘Pulled it off,’ said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. ‘Rosy hit the fire escape on time to a second and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at 9.30. She’s up at the flat – she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono – Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for now.’

  ‘The – the powder?’ stammered Ikey.

  ‘Oh, that stuff you gave me!’ said Chun
k broadening his grin; ‘well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, “Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square – don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.” And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps falls on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’ in a proper affection toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle’s coffee – see?’

  The Social Triangle

  At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose. Ikey was a tailor’s apprentice. Are there tailor’s apprentices nowadays?

  At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let shine.

  It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.

  For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

  Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring ‘El’ between the rows of reeking sweatshops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist for ever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette, you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.

  Ikey’s legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment known as the Café Maginnis – famous because it was the rendezvous of Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought, that the world had ever produced.

  Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots.