Part 4

Miriam grasped her husband's coat-sleeve, in her frenzy taking a fine pinch of flesh with it. Tears rained down her cheeks.

"There they are, Irving, all three of 'em on the second deck, waving down at us! Good-by, mamma, papa, Ray! Oh, Irving, I just can't stand to see 'em go! Papa, Ray, mamma darling!"

"Now, now, Miriam, think what a grand time they're going to have and how soon they're going to be home again."

"Oh, my darlings!"

Mrs. Binswanger sopped at her eyes, waving betimes the small black cap rescued in the up-deck rush.

Laughter crept with a tinge of hysteria into Miriam's voice. "Oh, darlings, I--I just can't bear to have you go. They're--they're moving, Irving! I--Oh, mamma, papa, darlings! They're moving, Irving!"

Out into the bay where the sunlight hung between blue water and bluer sky, a sea-gull swinging round her spar, the _Roumania_ steamed, unconscious of her freight.

"Good-by, mamma, good-by. Let's follow them to the end of the pier, Irving. I--I want to watch them till they're out of sight."

"Don't cry so, darling!"

"Look! look, see that black speck; it's papa! Oh, I love him, Irving. Good-by, my darlings! Good-by! They didn't want to go except for me, and--Oh, my darlings!"

"Come, dear, we can't see them any more. Come now, it's all over, dear."

They picked their way through the dispersing crowd back toward the dock gates.

"See, dear, how grand everything is! You and me happy here and--"

"Oh, Irving, I know, but--"

"But nothing."

"Pin my veil for me, dear, to--to hide my eyes. I bet I'm a sight!"

"You're not a sight, you're a beauty!"

"'Sh-h-h-h, I don't feel like making fun, Irving!"

"It's a hot day, dear, so we got to celebrate some cool way. Let's take a cab and--"

"No, Irving dear, we can't afford another one."

"To-day we can afford any old thing we want."

"No, no, dear."

"I got it, then! If we ride down to the Battery we can catch a boat for Brighton. Then we can have a little boat-ride all our own, eh? You and me, darling, on a boat-trip all our own."

She turned her shining eyes full upon him. "That'll be just perfect, Irving!" she said.

ROLLING STOCK

In the great human democracy, revolution cannot uncrown the builder of bridges to place upon his throne the builder of pantry shelves. Gray matter and blue blood and white pigment are not dynasties of man's making. Accident of birth, and not primogeniture, makes master minds and mulattoes, seamstresses and rich men's sons. Wharf-rats are more often born than made.

That is why, in this dynasty not of man's making, weavers gone blind from the intricacies of their queen's coronation robe, can kneel at her hem to kiss the cloth of gold that cursed them. A peasant can look on at a poet with no thought to barter his black bread and lentils for a single gossamer fancy. Backstair slaveys vie with each other whose master is more mighty. And this is the story of Millie Moores who, with no anarchy in her heart and no feud with the human democracy, could design for women to whom befell the wine and pearl dog-collars of life, frocks as sheer as web, and on her knees beside them, her mouth full of pins and her sole necklace a tape-measure, thrill to see them garbed in the glory of her labor.

Indeed, when the iridescent bubble of reputation floated out from her modest dressmaking rooms in East Twenty-third Street, Millie Moores, whom youth had rushed past, because she had no leisure for it, felt her heart open like a grateful flower when life brought her more chores to do. And when one day a next-year's-model limousine drew up outside her small doorway with the colored fashion sheet stuck in the glass panel, and one day another, and then one spring day three of them in shining procession along her curb, something cheeped in Millie Moores's heart and she doubled her prices.

And then because ladies long of purse and short of breath found the three dark flights difficult, and because the first small fruit of success burst in Millie Moores's mouth, releasing its taste of wine, she withdrew her three-figure savings account from the Manhattan Trust Company, rented an elevator-service, mauve-upholstered establishment on middle Broadway, secured the managerial services of a slender young man fresh from the Louis Quinze rooms of Madam Roth--Modes, Fifth Avenue, tripled her prices, and emerged from the brown cocoon of Twenty-third Street, Madam Moores, Modiste.

Two years later, three perfect-thirty-six sibyls promenaded the mauve display rooms, tempting those who waddle with sleeveless frocks that might have been designed for the Venus of Milo warmed to life.

The presiding young man, slim and full of the small ways that ingratiate, and with a pomaded glory of tow hair rippling back in a double wave that women's fingers itched to caress and men's hands itched to thresh, pushed forward the mauve velvet chairs with a waiter's servility, but none of his humility; officiated over the crowded pages of the crowded appointment-book, jotted down measurements with an imperturbability that grew for every inch the tape-line measured over and above.

Last, Madam Moores, her small figure full of nerves; two spots of red high on her cheeks; her erstwhile graying hairs, a bit premature and but a sprinkling of them, turned to the inward of a new and elaborate coiffure; and meeting this high tide with a smile, newly enhanced by bridge-work and properly restrained to that dimension of insolence demanded by the rich of those who serve them well.

In the springtime Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue turn lightly to thoughts of Narragansett Pier and Bronx Park. Fifth Avenue sheds its furs and Sixth Avenue its woolen underwear. At the dusk of one such day, when the taste of summer was like poppy leaves crushed between the teeth, and open streetcars and open shirtwaists blossomed forth even as the distant larkspur in the distant field, Madam Moores beheld the electric-protection door swing behind the last customer and relaxed frankly against a table piled high with fabrics of a dozen sheens.

"Whew! Thank heavens, she's gone!"

To a symphony of six-o'clock whistles the rumble of machines from the workrooms suddenly ceased.

"Turn out the shower lights, Phonzie, and see that Van Nord's black lace goes out in time for opera to-night. When she telephoned at noon I told her it was on the way."

Mr. Alphonse Michelson hurtled a mauve-colored footstool and hastened rearward toward the swinging-door that led to the emptying workrooms. The tallest of the perfect-thirty-sixes, stepping out of her beaded slippers into sturdier footwear of the street, threw him a smile as he passed that set her glittering earrings and metal-yellow ringlets bobbing like bells in a breeze.

"Hand me the shoe-buttoner, Phonzie. The doctor says stooping is bad for my hair-pins."

Their laughter, light as foam, met and mingled.

"Oh, you nervy Gertie!"

"What's your hurry, Phonzie dearie?"

"I don't see you stopping me."

"Fine chance, with her crouching over there, ready to spring."

"Hang around, sweetness. Maybe I'm not on duty, and I'll take you to supper if you've not got a date with one of your million-dollar Charlies."

"Soft pedal, Phonzie! You know I'd break a date with any one of 'em any day in the week for a sixty-cent table d'hote with you!"

"Hang around then, sweetness."

"Hang around! Gawd, if I hang around you any more than I have been doing in the last five years, following you from one establishment to the other, they'll have to kill me to put me out of my misery."

"You're all right, Gert. And when you haven't any of the greenback boys around to fill in, you can always fall back on me."

"You're a nice old boy, Phonzie, and I like the kink in your hair, but--but sometimes when I get blue, like to-night, I--I just wish I had never clapped eyes on you."

"How she hates me."

"I wish to God I did."

"Cut the tragedy, Gert."

"That's the trouble; I been cutting it for the mock comedy all my life."

"You, the highest little flyer in the flock!"

"Yeh, because I've never found anybody who even cares enough about me to clip my wings." Her laughter was short and with a blunt edge.

"Whew! Such a spill for you, Gert!"

"It's the spring gets on my nerves, I guess. Blow me to a table d'hôte to-night, Phonzie. I got a red-ink thirst on me and I'm as blue as indigo."

"Hang around, Gert, and if I'm not on duty I--"

"Honest, you're the greatest kid to squirm when you think a girl is going to pin you down. You let me get about as serious as a musical comedy with you and then you put up the barbed wire."

"Yes, I do not!"

"Fine chance I've got of ever pinning you down! You care about as much for me as--as anybody else does, and that ain't saying much."

"Aw, Gert, you got the dumps--"

"Look at her over there. I can see by her profile she's hanging around to buy you your dinner to-night. Whatta you bet she springs the appointment-book yarn on you and you fall for it?"

A laugh flitted beneath Mr. Michelson's blond hedge of mustache. "Can I help it that I got such hypnotizing, mesmerizing ways?"

She smiled beneath her rouge, and wanly. "No, darling," she said.

Across the room Madam Moores regarded them from beside the pile of sheeny silks, her fingers plucking nervously at the fabrics.

"Hurry up over there, Phonzie. I told her the black lace was on the way."

Miss Dobriner daubed at her red lips with a lacy fribble of handkerchief, her voice sotto behind it.

"Don't let her pin you, Phonzie. Have a heart and take me to supper when I'm blue as indigo."

He leaned to impale a pin upon his lapel. "She's so white to me, Gert, how can I squirm if she asks me to go over the appointment-book with her to-night?"

"Tell her your grandmother's dead."

He leaned for another pin. "Stick around down in Seligman's. If I dust my hat with my handkerchief when I pass, I'm nailed for the evening. If I can wriggle I'll blow you to Churchey's for supper."

"I--"

"'Sh-h-h-h."

He retreated behind the mauve-colored swinging-door. The two remaining sibyls, hatted and coated to crane the neck of the passer-by, hurried arm-in-arm out into the spring evening. An errand girl, who had dropped her skirt and put up her hair so that the eye of the law might wink at her stigma of youth, hung the shimmering gowns away for another day's display. Gertie Dobriner patted her ringed fingers against her mouth to press back a yawn and trailed across the room, adjusting her hat before a full-length mirror. In the light from a single electric bulb her hair showed three colors--yellow gold, green gold, and, toward the roots, the dark gold of old bronze.

"You can go now, Gert."

"Yes, madam."

Miss Dobriner adjusted a spray of curls. Through the mirror she could observe the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Did--did Du Gass order that fish-tail model, madam?"

Madam Moores dallied with her appointment-book. Through the mirror she could observe the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Yes, in green."

"If I had her complexion I'd wear sandpaper to match it."

"We haven't all of us got the looks, Gert, that'll get us four-carat stones to wear down to a twenty-dollar-a-week job."

Miss Dobriner's hand flew to her throat and the gem that gleamed there. "I--I guess I can buy a stone on time for myself without--without any insinuations."

"You can wear the stone, all right, Gert, but you can't get past the insinuations."

"I--I ain't so stuck on this place, madam, that I got to stand for your insinuations."

"No, it ain't the _place_ you're stuck on that keeps you here, Gert."

They regarded each other through eyes banked with the red fires of anger, and beside the full-length mirror Miss Dobriner trembled as she stood.

"You can think what you please, madam. I--I'm hired by Phonzie and I'm here to wear models and not to steer your thinking."

Madam Moores sat so tense in her chair that her weight did not relax to it. "You and me can't have no fusses, you know that, don't you? I give Phonzie the run of my floor, and he's the one has to deal with--with freshness."

"You--you started it, madam. I--can get along with anybody. I don't have to stay in a place where I'm not wanted; it's just because Phonzie--"

"We won't fuss about it, Gertie. I'm the last one to fall out with my help."

Silence.

"Did--did Laidlaw order that trotteur model in plaid, Gert?"

"No; she's coming back to-morrow."

"To-day's the day to land an order."

"She says that pongee we made her last spring never fit her slick enough between the shoulders. I felt like telling her we don't guarantee to fit tubs."

"You got to handle Laidlaw right, Gert. There'll be two trousseaux and a ball in that family before June. The best way to lose a customer like Laidlaw is to sell her what she ought to wear instead of what she wants to wear."

"Handle her right! I wore rubber gloves. Did I quiver an eyelash when she ordered that pink organdie, and didn't Phonzie nearly double up when he took down the order? You want to see her measurements. I'll get the book and--"

"No, no, Gert; you can go on. I got to stay and go over the appointments with Phonzie."

A quick red flowed up and under the rouged surface of Miss Dobriner's cheeks. "Oh--excuse me!"

"What!"

"I--All right, I'm going."

She readjusted her hat, a tiny winged chariot of pink straw and designed after fashion's most epileptic caprice, coaxed her ringed fingers into a pair of but slightly soiled white gloves, her eyes the while staring past her slim reflection in the mirror and on to the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Good night, Gert."

Miss Dobriner bared her teeth to a smile and closed her lips again before she spoke. "Good night--madam."

Then she went out, clicking the door behind her. Through the mauve-colored swinging-door and scarcely a clock-tick later entered Mr. Alphonse Michelson, spick, light-footed, slim.

"Charley's left with the black lace, madam."

It was as if Madam Moores suddenly threw off the husk of the day. "Tired, Phonzie?"

He ran a hand across his silk hair and glanced about. "Everybody gone?"

"Yes."

He reached for his hat and cane and a pair of untried gray gloves atop them. "I sent the yellow taffeta out on a C.O.D. That gold buckle she wanted on the shoulder cost her just twenty bucks more."

"Good!"

He fitted on his hat carefully and snapped his gloves across his palm. "Well, I'm off, madam."

She adjusted her hat in a simulation of indifference. "Like to come up to the flat for supper and--and go over the books, Phonzie?"

"Huh?"

"There's plenty for two and--and we could kind of go over things."

He twirled his cane. "Oh, I--I'm running up there too often, sponging off you."

"Sponging! Like I'd ask you if I didn't want you!"

"I been up there sponging off you three times this week. Anyways, I'm--"

"Don't I always just give you pot luck?"

"Yes, but you'll think afterwhile that I got you mixed up with my meal-ticket."

A sensitive seepage of blood rushed over Madam Moores's nervous face, stinging it. "Of course, if you won't want to come!"

"Don't want to come! A fellow that's never had a snap like your cozy corner in his life--"

"Of course if--if you got a date with one of--of the models or something."

"I never said that, did I?"

"Well, get that sponging idea out of your head, Phonzie. There's always plenty for two in my cupboard. Like I says the other night, what's the use being able to afford my little flat if I can't get some pleasure out of it?"

"It sure looks good to this hall-room Johnnie."

She gathered her gloves and her black silk handbag. "Then come, Phonzie," she said, "I'm going to take you home." And her throat might have been lined with fur.

They went out together, locking the doors behind them, and into an evening as soft as silk and full of stars.

Along the wide up-town street the human tide flowed fast and as if thaw had set in, releasing it from the bondage of winter. Girls in light wraps and without hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights. Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two. In front of Seligman's florist shop, which occupied the ground floor of Madam Moores's dressmaking establishment, Alphonse Michelson paused for a moment in the flare of its decorative show-window and flecked at his hatband with sheer untried handkerchief.

"Come on, Phonzie."

"Coming, madam."

In the up-town Subway, bound for the up-town flat, he leaned to her with his small blond mustache raised in a smile.

"Where's the book, madam?"

"Forgot it," she replied, without shame.

* * * * *

Out of three hundred and eighty dollars cash, a bit of black and gold brocade flung adroitly over the imitation hearth, a cot masquerading under a Mexican afghan of many colors, a canary in a cage, a potted geranium, a shallow chair with a threadbare head-rest, a lamp, a rug, a two-burner gas-stove, Madam Moores had evolved Home.

And why not? The Petit Trianon was built that a queen might there find rest from marble halls. The Borghese women in their palaces live behind drawn shades, but Italian peasants sit in their low doorways and sing as they rock and suckle.

In Madam Moores's two-flights-up flat the windows were flung open to the moist air of spring, which flowed in cool as water between crisp muslin curtains, stirring them. In the sudden flare of electric light the canary unfolded its head from a sheaf of wing, cheeped, and fell to picking up seed from the bottom of its cage.

Mr. Alphonse Michelson collapsed into the shallow chair beside the table and relaxed his head against the threadbare dent in the upholstery.

"Whoops! home never was like this!"

"Is him tired?"

"Dead."

"Smoke?"

"Yep."

"There."

"Ah!"

"Now him all comfy and I go fix poor tired bad boy him din-din."

More native than mother-tongue is Mother's tongue. Whom women love they would first destroy with gibberish. To Mr. Michelson's linguistic credit, however, he shifted in his chair in unease.

"What did you say?"

"What him want for din-din?"

He slung one slim leg atop the other, slumping deeper to the luxury of his chair. "Dinner?"

"Yes, din-din."

"Say, those were swell chicken livers smothered in onions you served the other night, madam. Believe me, those were some livers!"

No, reader, Romance is not dead. On the contrary, he has survived the frock-coat and learned to chew a clove.

A radiance as soft as the glow from a pink-shaded lamp flowed over Madam Moores's face.

"Livers him going to have and biscuits made in my own ittsie bittsie oven. Eh?"

"Swell."

She divested herself of her wraps, fluffing her mahogany-colored hair where the hat had restricted it, lighted a tiny stove off in the tiny kitchenette and enveloped herself in a blue-bib-top apron. Her movements were short and full of caprice, and when she set the table, brushing his chair as she passed and repassed, lights came out in her eyes when she dared raise her lids to show them.

They dined by the concealed fireplace and from off a table that could fold its legs under like Aladdin's. Fumes of well-made coffee rose as ingratiating as the perfume of a love story. Mr. Michelson dropped a lump of butter into the fluffy heart of a biscuit and clapped the halves together.

"Some biscuits!"

"Bad boy, stop jollying."

"Say, if I'd tell you the truth about what I think of these biscuits, you'd say I was writing a streetcar advertisement for baking-powder. Say, this is some cup custard!"

"More?"

"Full to my eyebrows."

"Just a little bittsie?"

"Nope."

He lighted a cigarette and they settled back in after-dinner completeness, their dessert-plates pushed well toward the center of the table and their senses quiet. She pleated the edge of her napkin and watched him blow leisurely spirals of smoke to the ceiling.

"What you thinking about, Phonzie?"

"Nothing."

"Honest?"

"If I was thinking at all I was just sizing it up as pretty soft for a fellow like me to get this sort of stand-in with--with my boss. Gawd! me and Roth used to love each other like snakes."

"I--I ain't your boss, Phonzie. Don't I give you the run of everything--hiring the models and all?"

"Sure you're my boss, and it's pretty soft for me."

"And I was just thinking, Phonzie, that it's pretty soft for me to have found a fellow like you to manage things for me."

"Shucks!"

"Without you, so used to the ways of the Avenue and all that kind of thing, where would I be now, trying to run in the right kind of bluff with the trade?"

"That's easy! After all, Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue is pretty much alike in the end, madam. A spade may be a spade, but if you're a good salesman, you can put it on black velvet and sell it for a dessert-spoon any day in the week."

"That's just what I'm saying, Phonzie, about you're knowing how. I needed just a fellow like you to show me how the swell trade has got to be blindfolded, and that the difference between a dressmaker and a modiste is about a hundred and fifty dollars a gown."

"You ought to see the way we handled them when I was on the floor for Roth. Say, we wouldn't touch a peignoir in that establishment for under two hundred and fifty, and--we had 'em coming in there like sheep. The Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do down there with the Avenue business."

"You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie."

"Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?"

"Twenty years! Why, Phonzie, you--you don't look much more than twenty yourself."

He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."

"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."

"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first--a pair of carpet slippers and a patent rocker."

"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."

"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."

"I--I just can't get over it, Phonzie, you _forty_! You five years older than me and me afraid--thinking all along it was just the other way."

"I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam."

"Whatta you know about that!"

"Ask Gert. She's been following me around from place to place for years, sticking to me because I say there ain't a model in the business can show the clothes like she can."

"Yes?"