Mrs.
Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not dare to interrupt her
description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had
occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the
confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner
of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain
the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one
of the professions that fitted Mrs.Parker's parlours.
Next you
ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second floor back at $8.
Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr.
Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's
orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent
the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble
that you wanted something still cheaper. If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn,
you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's large hall-room on the third floor. Mr.
Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all
day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the
lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible
eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then - oh, then
- if you still stood on one foot with your hot hand clutching the three moist
dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable
poverty, nevermore would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly
the word 'Clara,' she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then
Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served
for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8 feet
of floorspace at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber
closet or store-room. In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf
was the dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides
of a coin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you
looked up as
from a well - and breathed once more. Through the glass of the little skylight
you saw a square of blue infinity.
'Two dollars,
suh,' Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss
Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged
around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair
that kept on growing after
she had stopped
and that always looked as if they were saying:
'Goodness me.
Why didn't you keep up with us?'
Mrs. Parker
showed her the double parlours. 'In this closet,' she
said, 'one
could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal - '
'But I am neither
a doctor nor a dentist,' said Miss Leeson with
a shiver. Mrs.
Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for
those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the
second floor back.
'Eight
dollars?' said Miss Leeson. 'Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green. I'm
just a poor little working girl. Show me some-
thing higher
and lower.' Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs
at the rap on
his door. 'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's
smile at his
pale looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your
lambrequins. ''They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly
the way the angels do. After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing
the tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting
a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
'Anna Held'll
jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the
lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish. Presently
the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson's
purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a
vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and
cabalistic words 'Two dollars!' 'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking
down upon the squeaky iron bed. Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At
night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her
typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the
steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended
for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was
gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder
read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, 'It's No Kid; or, The
Heir of the Subway.' There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss
Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker,
the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said 'Well, really!' to
everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot
at the moving ducks at Coney every
Sunday and
worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson
sat on the middle step, and the men would quickly group around her. Especially
Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private,
romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr. Hoover, who was
forty-five, fat, flushed and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans, who
set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men
voted her 'the funniest and jolliest ever,' but the sniffs on the top step and the
lower step were implacable. I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks
to the foot-lights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover.
Tune the pipes
to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried
out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have
Romeo's rickety ribs to
the ounce. A
lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men
remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt,
Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself;
Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat, is meat for perdition. There was
never a chance for you, Hoover. As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's
evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay
laugh:
'Why, there's
Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.'
All looked up -
some at the windows of skyscrapers, some cast-ing about for an airship, Jackson
guided.
'It's that
star,' explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. 'Not the big one
that twinkles - the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through
my skylight. I named it Billy Jack-
son. ''Well,
really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'I didn't know you were an astronomer, Miss
Leeson.'
'Oh, yes,' said
the small star-gazer, 'I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves
they're going to wear next fall in Mars.'
'Well, really!'
said Miss Longnecker. 'The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constellation
Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian passage is -
''Oh,' said the very young Mr. Evans, 'I think Billy Jackson is a much better
name for it. 'Same here,' said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker.
'I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name
stars as any of
those old astrologers had.'
'Well, really!'
said Miss Longnecker. 'I wonder whether it's a shooting star,' remarked Miss
Dorn. 'I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at ConeySunday. ''He
doesn't show up very well from down here,' said Miss Leeson. 'You ought to see
him from my room. You know you can
see stars even
in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of
a coal-mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that
Night fastens her kimono with.'There came a time after that when Miss Leeson
brought no for-midable papers home to copy. And when she went in the morning,instead
of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the
drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came an
evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she
always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner. As
she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He asked
her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She
dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand, and she raised it and
smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the
railing.
She passed Mr.
Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss
Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to 'pirouette across stage from L to the
side of the Count.' Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the
door of the skylight room. She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress.
She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn
springs. And in that Erebus of a room she slowly raised her heavy eyelids,and
smiled. For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of
blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she
had so whimsically, and oh, so ineffectually, named.
Miss Longnecker
must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy
Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma. As she lay on her back she
tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her
lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back
limply. 'Good-bye, Billy,' she murmured faintly. 'You're millions of miles away
and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the
time up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't
you? . . . Millions of miles... . Good-bye, Billy Jackson.' Clara, the coloured
maid, found the door locked at ten the next day, and they forced it open.
Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and even burnt feathers, proving of no
avail, someone ran to 'phone for an ambulance. In due time it backed up to the
door with much gong-clanging,and the capable young medico, in his white linen
coat, ready,active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim,danced
up the steps.
'Ambulance call
to 49,' he said briefly. 'What's the trouble?'
'Oh yes,
doctor,' sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should be
trouble in the house was the greater. 'I can't think what can be the matter
with her. Nothing we could do would
bring her to.
It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie - yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my
house - ''What room?' cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker
was a stranger.
'The skylight
room. It - 'Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of
skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed
slowly, as her dignity demanded. On the first landing she met him coming back
bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practiced scalpel
of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment
that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards there remained crumples in her
mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said
to her.
'Let that be,'
she would answer. 'If I can get forgiveness for having heard it I will be
satisfied.'
The ambulance
physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that follow the
curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his
face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed
that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form
that he carried, and all that he said was: 'Drive like h - l, Wilson,' to the
driver.
That is all. Is
it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item, and the last
sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents together. It
recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been
removed from No. 49 East - Street, suffering from debility induced by
starvation. It concluded with these words:
'Dr. William
Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended
the case, says
the patient will recover.'
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