THE LONG DAY

VI

IN WHICH PHŒBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH
UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE

DON'T you never read no story-books?" Mrs. Smith asked, stirring the paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. She looked at me curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith did n't like me for some reason or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I 'd prove I was n't. My confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of storybooks had the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably:   "How do you like 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"   "I've never read that," I replied. "Is it good?"   "It 's fine," interposed Phœbe; "but I like 'Woven on Fate's Loom' better — don't you?" The last addressed to Mrs. Smith.   "No, I can't say as that's my impinion," returned our vis-á-vis, with a judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping paste-brush over the strips. "Not but what 'Woven on Fate's Loom' is a good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story. But I think 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is more int'resting, besides being better wrote."   "And that 's just what I don't like about it," retorted Phœbe, her fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes. "You like this hot-air talk, and I don't; and the way them fellows and girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!"   "What is it about?" I asked with respectful interest, addressing the question to Mrs. Smith, who gave promise of being a more serious reviewer than the flippant Phœbe. Mrs. Smith took a bite of gingerbread and began:   "It 's about a fair, beautiful young girl by the name of Rosebud Arden. Her pa was a judge, and they lived in a grand mansion in South Car'lina. Little Rosebud — that 's what everybody called her had a stepsister Maud. They was both beauties, only Maud did n't have a lovely disposition like Little Rosebud. A Harvard gradjate by the name of Percy Fielding got stuck on Little Rosebud for the wealth she was to get from her pa, and she was terrible stuck on him. She was stuck on him for fair, though not knowing he was a villian of the deepest dye. That 's what the book called him. He talked her into marrying him clandestinely. Maud and her mother put up a job to get rid of Little Rosebud, so Maud could get all the money. So they told lies to her pa, who loved her something awful; and one night, when she came in after walking in the grand garden with her husband, who nobody knew she was married to, she found herself locked out. Then she went to the hotel where he was staying, and told him what had happened; but he turned her down flat when he heard it, for he did n't want nothing to do with her when she was n't to get her pa's money; and then ——"   She stopped her cornering to inspect my work, which had not flagged an instant. Mrs. Smith took another bite of gingerbread, and continued with increasing animation:   "And then Little Rosebud turned away into the night with a low cry, just as if a dagger had been punched into her heart and turned around slow. She was only sixteen years old, and she had been brought up in luxury and idolized by her father; and all of a sudden she found herself homeless, with nowheres to sleep and no money to get a room at the hotel, and scorned by the man that had sworn to protect her. Her pa had cursed her, too, something awful, so that he burst a blood-vessel a little while afterwards and died before morning. Only Little Rosebud never found this out, for she took the midnight express and came up here to New York, where her aunt lived, only she did n't know the street-number."   "Where did she get the money to come to New York with?" interrupted the practical Phœbe. "That 's something I don't understand. If she did n't have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in South Carolina for overnight, I 'd like to know where she got money for a railroad ticket."   "Well, that 's just all you know about them swells," retorted Mrs. Smith. "I suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over the country on a pass. And saying she did n't have a pass, it 's only a story and not true anyway.   "She met a fellow on the train that night who was a villian for fair!" she went on. "His name was Mr. Paul Howard, and he was a corker. Little Rosebud, who was just as innocent as they make 'em, fell right into his clutches. He was a terrible man; he would n't stop at nothing, but he was a very elegant-looking gentleman that you 'd take anywheres for a banker or 'Piscopalian preacher. He tipped his hat to Little Rosebud, and then she up and asked if he knew where her aunt, Mrs. Waldron, lived. This was nuts for him, and he said yes, that Mrs. Waldron was a particular lady-friend of his. When they got to New York he offered to take Little Rosebud to her aunt's house. And as Little Rosebud had n't no money, she said yes, and the villian called a cab and they started for Brooklyn, him laughing to himself all the time, thinking how easily she was going to tumble into the trap he was getting fixed for her."   "Hot air!" murmured Phœbe.   "But while they were rattling over the Brooklyn Bridge, another man was following them in another cab — a Wall-street broker with barrels of cash. He was Raymond Leslie, and a real good man. He 'd seen Rosebud get into the cab with Paul Howard, who he knew for a villian for fair. They had a terrible rumpus, but Raymond Leslie rescued her and took her to her aunt's house. It turned out that he was the gentleman-friend of Little Rosebud's cousin Ida, the very place they were going to. But, riding along in the cab, he fell in love with Little Rosebud, and then he was in a terrible pickle because he was promised to Ida. Little Rosebud's relations lived real grand, and her aunt was real nice to her until she saw she had hooked on to Ida's gentleman-friend; then they put her to work in the kitchen and treated her terrible. Oh, I tell you she had a time of it, for fair. Her aunt was awful proud and wicked, and after while, when she found that Raymond Leslie was going to marry Little Rosebud even if they did make a servant of her, she hired Paul Howard to drug her and carry her off to an insane-asylum that he ran up in Westchester County. It was in a lonesome place, and was full of girls that he had loved only to grow tired of and cast off, and this was the easiest way to get rid of them and keep them from spoiling his sport. Once a girl was in love with Paul Howard, she loved him till death. He just fascinated women like a snake does a bird, and he was hot stuff as long as he lasted, but the minute he got tired of you he was a demon of cruelty.   "He did everything he could, when he got Little Rosebud here, to get her under his power. He tried his dirty best to poison her food, but Little Rosebud was foxy and would n't touch a bite of anything, but just sat in her cell and watched the broiled chicken and fried oysters, and all the other good things they sent to tempt her, turn to a dark-purplish hue. One night she escaped disguised in the turnkey's daughter's dress. Her name was Dora Gray, and Paul Howard had blasted her life too, but she worshiped him something awful, all the same-ee. Dora Gray gave Little Rosebud a lovely dark-red rose that was soaked with deadly poison, so that if you touched it to the lips of a person, the person would drop dead. She told Little Rosebud to protect herself with it if they chased her. But she did n't get a chance to see whether it would work or not, for when she heard them coming back of her after while with the bloodhounds barking, she dropped with terror down flat on her stummick. She had suffered so much she could n't stand anything more. The doctors said she was dead when they picked her up, and they buried her and stuck a little white slab on her grave, with 'Rosebud, aged sixteen' on it."   "Hot air!" from the irrepressible Phœbe.   I felt that courtesy required I should agree upon that point, and I did so, conservatively, venturing to ask the name of the author.   Mrs. Smith mentioned the name of a well-known writer of trashy fiction and added, "Did n't you never read none of her books?"   My negative surprised her. Then Phœbe asked:   "Did you ever read 'Daphne Vernon; or, A Coronet of Shame'?"   "No, I have n't read them, either," I replied.   "Oh, mama! Carry me out and let me die!" groaned Mrs. Smith, throwing down her paste-brush and falling forward in mock agony upon the smeared table.   "Water! Water!" gasped Phœbe, clutching wildly at her throat; "I'm going to faint!"   "What 's the matter? What did I say that was n't right?" I cried, the nature of their antics showing only too plainly that I had "put my foot in it" in some unaccountable manner. But they paid no attention. Mortified and utterly at sea, I watched their convulsed shoulders and heard their smothered giggles. Then in a few minutes they straightened up and resumed work with the utmost gravity of countenance and without a word of explanation.   "What was it you was asting?" Phœbe inquired presently, with the most innocent air possible.   "I said I had n't read the books you mentioned," I replied, trying to hide the chagrin and mortification I felt at being so ignominiously laughed at.   "Eyether of them?" chirped Mrs. Smith, with a vicious wink.   "Eyether of them?" warbled Phœbe in her mockingbird soprano.   It was my turn to drop the paste-brush now. Eye-ther! It must have slipped from my tongue unconsciously. I could not remember having ever pronounced the word like that before.   I did n't feel equal, then and there, to offering them any explanation or apologies for the offense. So I simply answered:   "No; are they very good? are they as good as 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"   "No, it ain't," said Mrs. Smith, decisively and a little contemptuously; "and it ain't two books, eye-ther; it 's all in one — 'Daphne Vernon; or, A Coronet of Shame.'"   "Well, now I think it is," put in Phœbe. "Them stories with two-handled names is nearly always good. I 'll buy a book with a two-handled name every time before I 'll buy one that ain't. I was reading a good one last night that I borrowed from Gladys Carringford. It had three handles to its name, and they was all corkers."   "Why don't you spit 'em out?" suggested Mrs. Smith. "Tell us what it was."   "Well, it was 'Doris; or, The Pride of Pember ton Mills; or, Lost in a Fearful Fate's Abyss.' What d' ye think of that?"   "It sounds very int'resting. Who wrote it?"   "Charles Garvice," replied Phœbe. "Did n't you ever read none of his, e—y—e—ther?"   "No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.   "And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs. Smith, with remorseless cruelty — "none of Charlotte M. Braeme's, eye-ther?"   "No."   "Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e—y—e—ther?" still persisted Mrs. Smith.   "No; none by her."   "E—y—e—ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences returned to earth and speaking-voices again.   "What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and -girl are supposed to have read. They had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Misérables," were also unknown, unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the fecund pens of Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks being that their titles did n't sound interesting. I spoke enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce anybody to Meg and Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family. When I had finished, Phœbe stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith looked up from her label-pasting.   "Why, that 's no story at all," the latter declared.   "Why, no," echoed Phœbe; "that 's no story — that 's just everyday happenings. I don't see what 's the use putting things like that in books. I 'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be — could n't you, Gwendolyn?"   "Yep," yawned our vis-à-vis, undisguisedly bored.   "But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Phœbe generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything that us city folks are."   While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients.   The quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens, making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream Book."   Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The Fatal Wedding."   Phœbe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words: "The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth Have gathered in splendid array;  But silent and sad is a fair woman there, Whose young heart is pining away. "A card is brought to her — she reads there a name Of one that she loved long ago;  Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I 'm not here, For my story he never must know.' "That night in the banquet at Misery Hall She reigned like a queen on a throne;  But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes As she dreamed of the love she had known. "Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song To the days she could never recall,  And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast At the banquet in Misery Hall. "The time passes quickly, and few in the throng Have noticed the one vacant chair —  Till out of the beautiful garden beyond A pistol-shot rings on the air. "Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays — Too quickly his life doth depart;  While kneeling beside him, the woman he 'd loved Finds her picture is close to his heart."   "What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of Phœbe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room was hushed, had died away.   "That! Why, it 's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith, somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that fol beginning of page lowed one another without interlude. Phœbe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging them into piles of twelve high; so she could n't sing, and I, consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books. Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject — the frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted, betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay, persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious, with all good things added unto it.   It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I could n't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden of the song seemed so unworthy.   "You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where did you learn?"   Phœbe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes, and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.   "I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Phœbe. "Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought to hear them sing Dago songs, ought n't she, Gwendolyn?"   "Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie Polatta singing that — what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bust out crying?"   "You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that 's a corker; but, Lord! the one what makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that 'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them — what she says she learned in the old country. I would n't want anything to eat if I could hear songs like that all the time."   The clock-hands over Annie Kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour of six, and Angela had only begun the first stanza of — "Papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day;  I 'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away.  You don't know how much I 'm longing for her loving good-night kiss!"  Papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this: "Down in the City of Sighs and Tears, under the white light's glare,  Down in the City of Wasted Years, you 'll find your mama there,  Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers;  And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs and Tears."   The machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering stillness with the soft crescendo refrain "Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers;  And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs and Tears —  In the City of Sighs and Tears."